Rooting its work in the Arctic, with and for Arctic communities, the "Sense Making, Place attachment, and Extended networks, as sources of Resilience in the Arctic" (SeMPER-Arctic) project consortium will be collecting local stories of changes, shocks, upheavals and their aftermaths. The SeMPER-Arctic team members will adopt these narratives as local, and localized, anchoring devices for resilience analysis. Members of three Arctic communities have been involved in the preparation of SeMPER-Arctic and the consortium has committed to work with and for these communities. Their stories of individual and collective ability to fare through shocks, threat, unusually fast changes, will constitute SeMPER-Arctic central corpus. Two broad categories of narratives that are external to communities have been identified as priority area of enquiry : environmental science and public policy and regional development. The consortium will analyse how these narratives interact with local narrative of resilience. This will allow for the assessment of their impacts. The interdisciplinary framework of resilience interpretations will be used to examine the resilience narratives in the light of the dimension that are salient for the members of arctic communities. The consortium will be in a position to take stock of the lessons learned in its three pilot implementation sites. It will have developed a narrative centred, locally rooted, place-based understanding of resilience within arctic communities. This understanding is key for developing tools and strategies to increasing community resilience in other communities. These results will call for sharing the lessons learned with regional planners and policy-makers. The consortium will thus be contributing to the knowledge base on global environmental change through respectful, non-prejudiced, enquiry of what it means to be a resilient arctic community in the 21st century. The results of this analysis will be translated into options for actions, at the local, regional, national and circumpolar levels.

ARTISTICC’s goal is to apply innovative standardized transdisciplinary approaches to develop robust, socially, culturally and scientifically, community centred adaptation strategies as well as a series of associated policy briefs. The approach used in the project is based on the strong understanding that adaptation is: (a) still "a concept of uncertain form”; (b) a concept dealing with uncertainty; (c) a concept that calls for an analysis that goes beyond the traditional disciplinary organization of science, and; (d) an unconventional process in the realm of science and policy integration. The project is centered on case studies in France, Greenland, Russia, India, Canada, Alaska, and Senegal. In every site we analyze how natural science can be used in order to better adapt in the future, how society adapt to current changes and how memories of past adaptations frames current and future processes. ARTISTICC is thus a project fundamentally centered on coastal communities. These analyses allow for a better understanding of adaptation as a scientific, social, economic and cultural practice in coastal settings. In order to share these results with local communities and policy makers, this in a way that respects cultural specificities while empowering stakeholders, ARTISTICC translates these “real life experiments” into stories and artwork that are meaningful to those affected by climate change. ARTISTICC is thus a research project that is profoundly culturally mediated. The scientific results and the culturally mediated productions will thereafter be used in order to co-construct, with NGOs and policy makers, policy briefs, i.e. robust and scientifically legitimate policy recommendations regarding coastal adaptation. This co-construction process will be in itself analyzed with the goal of increasing science’s performative functions in the universe of evidence-based policy making. The project involves scientists from natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities, working in France, Senegal, India, Russia, Greenland, Alaska, and Canada.