Climate change affects the Arctic in different ways. Regional impacts include coastal erosion, evolving ocean currents and temperatures, shifting migration patterns over land and sea, and melting permafrost that heaves buildings and roads. These changes lead to other effects as well; for example, melting permafrost releases stores of methane gas that have been locked up for thousands of years, a greenhouse gas “25 times more potent than carbon dioxide” when released. The consequences are global.

Nations are responding to the complex challenges of climate change by setting carbon reduction targets, enhancing sustainable development goals and assessing cumulative effects. The challenge is great but straightforward: how to best access and combine these large volumes of data to help scientists, resource managers, decision-makers and citizens predict changes to our environment, society and economy.  In the case of the Arctic, researchers and decision-makers can now rely on a digital infrastructure called the Arctic Spatial Data Infrastructure (Arctic SDI).

The Arctic SDI is a collaborative initiative of the National Mapping Agencies of the eight Arctic nations with a goal to promote partner-based development of an Arctic Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). The aim of the Arctic SDI is to provide politicians, governments, policy makers, scientists, private enterprises and citizens in the Arctic with access to geographically related Arctic data, digital maps, analytics, change detection, predictive modeling and tools for northern and remote communities to facilitate monitoring and decision making. NRCan provides “boots on the ground” for Arctic scientific diplomacy and sovereignty.

This initiative supports Arctic Council (AC) priorities, where joint projects and engagement activities were initiated with Working Groups and Permanent Participants, representing the six circumpolarIndigenous organizations. Arctic SDI is recognized by Senior Arctic Officials for improving data integration, sharing and analysis across the Arctic.

The Arctic SDI community is based on the “system of systems” or “network of networks” concept and, as such, has a nested suite of architectures based on web services and emerging back office suites of application programming interfaces based on international open standards. Arctic SDI is actively collaborating with Arctic stakeholders to create a seamless multidimensional “Digital Arctic” that will link the land, atmosphere, and marine Arctic domains within an integrated platform. The dimensions will comprise location (X, Y, or other coordinates), elevation/bathymetry/altitude, time, and flows to measure pathways and directions (e.g., currents, migration, icebergs, ice flows, etc.).

The Arctic SDI provides the behind-the-scenes connectivity needed to power and deliver data and maps via an online geoportal, similar to the electrical networks that we rely on daily. The Arctic SDI Geoportal is the access point that allows users to combine data from many different sources, create customized thematic and statistical maps and share these on their own websites as digital, interactive and embedded maps. The Geoportal also provides access to a place name search tool with three million Arctic place names, available in Latin, Cyrillic (Russian) and Syllabic (Inuit) character sets.

This collaboration between nations, in turn, supports the development of Canada’s data ecosystem that is needed to report on and realize the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) as well as federal/NRCan priorities related to Indigenous reconciliation, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and Arctic sovereignty.