Besides predicting the impacts of climate-related landscape changes on people’s livelihoods on permafrost, investigations of past and present local human impacts on permafrost dynamics is essential for understanding the complex interaction the permafrost landscape system.
The IPA (International Permafrost Association) Action Group (AG) “Permafrost and Culture (PaC)” aims to integrate interdisciplinary methods of social, geo- and environmental sciences to:
- Assess how local communities have made use and are making use of permafrost landscapes for subsistence activities,
- Understand how climate change is likely to change permafrost dynamics and indigenous land use, and
- Explore to what extent humans have appropriated and actively shaped thermokarst and permafrost landscapes, both in the short range of the current period and the mid-term, i.e. over several centuries
The AG also pursues a practical goal by synthesizing and combining PaC AG results and geo-information on sensible ice-rich permafrost with that on indigenous land use for different North-Eurasian regions.
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