Mike Pitre
Bridging The Adaptation Deficit; Evaluating The Effectiveness of Geo-Technological Applications for Building Arctic Community Climate Change Adaptive Capacity © 2011
This research provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge regarding the use geotechnology in climate change adaptation planning by Canadian arctic communities. The research assesses how and where geo-technological applications are being utilized to increase arctic community resilience to the impacts of climate change, whether they are effective and what can be done to make them more effective. A total of 2972 articles were evaluated using a systematic review approach, which yielded a total of 165 articles pertaining to geo-technological applications used to build community adaptive capacity to respond to climate change impacts affecting culture and learning, economic, health and well-being, subsistence harvesting, and transportation and infrastructure. An evaluation framework was developed combining climate change adaptation variables with geo-technological variables, which can be used by arctic communities to assess the utility of a geo-technological application during design, implementation and post-implementation of an adaptation practice. Research gaps and recommendations for improvements to the research are discussed. The integration of mapping, interactive geographic information systems (GIS), satellite imagery and Global Positioning
Systems (GPS) provide important opportunities for bridging gaps in climate change adaptation planning. However the consistent underlying themes related to arctic adaptation planning include increasing arctic community access to communication technology, developing local culturally sensitive training and data management practices, as well as the need to integrate community-level planning with larger scale and longer term research initiatives.