Grant: Alliance Grants

The discontinuous permafrost region of Canada's Northwest Territories (NWT) is one of the most rapidly warming on Earth. The scale and rate of warming-induced changes indicates this region is particularly sensitive to climate warming and capable of rapid change. Unprecedented rates of permafrost thaw are transforming land covers, changing the flow, storage and quality of water, and raising serious new concerns about the future availability and quality of northern water resources. Permafrost thaw has altered land covers, flow, sediment and biogeochemical regimes of streams, rivers, and lakes, and is thereby disrupting the economy, well-being and livelihoods of northerners. Government planners, decision makers and managers, co-management boards, municipalities and Indigenous communities, all urgently require science-based predictive tools and user-driven mitigation and adaptation strategies to ensure that "the waters of the Northwest Territories will remain clean, abundant and productive for all time", as envisioned in the NWT Water Stewardship Strategy. In direct response to these challenges, we propose the Discontinuous Permafrost Alliance (DPA), a NWT-focused partnership of knowledge producers, mobilisers and users from universities, Indigenous communities, and government, working collaboratively to improve the understanding of and ability to predict and mitigate the impacts of permafrost thaw on the NWT's water resources. DPA's overall goal is to deliver the adaptive risk management solutions informed by leading-edge science and supported by innovative decision support tools, needed to manage the rapid thaw in the NWT's discontinuous permafrost zone. This will be achieved by co-developing new i) knowledge needed to guide sustainable resource development, ii) practical, knowledge-based predictive and diagnostic tools, iii) adaptation strategies to minimise the impacts of permafrost thaw, and iv) collaborative networks to maximise knowledge uptake and application. DPA's solutions will be directly applicable to the peatland-dominated regions of discontinuous permafrost that dominate much of northern Canada and the circum-polar region.