Arctic Climate Impact Assessment

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The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) is a study describing the ongoing climate change in the Arctic and its consequences: rising temperatures, loss of sea ice, unprecedented melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and many impacts on ecosystems, animals, and people. The ACIA is the first comprehensively researched, fully referenced, and independently reviewed evaluation of arctic climate change and its impacts for the region and for the world. The project was guided by the intergovernmental Arctic Council and the non-governmental International Arctic Science Committee. Three hundred scientists participated in the study over a span of three years.

The ACIA Secretariat is located at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

[edit] Reports

The 140-page synthesis report Impacts of a Warming Arctic was released in November 2004, and the scientific report later in 2005. Both can be freely downloaded from the ACIA web site.

The NOAA State of the Arctic Report 2006 updates some of the records of the ACIA report. Taken collectively, the observations presented in the NOAA report show convincing evidence of a sustained period of warm temperature anomalies in the Arctic, supported by continued reduction in sea ice extent, observed at both the winter maximum and summer minimum, and widespread changes in arctic vegetation. The warming trend is tempered somewhat by shifts in the spatial patterns of land temperatures and ocean salinity and temperature. While there are still large region to region and multiyear shifts in the arctic climate, the large spatial extent of recent changes in air temperature, sea ice, and vegetation is greater than observed in the 20th century.

The NOAA report is a review of environmental conditions during the past five years relative to those in the latter part of the 20th century, conducted by an international group of twenty scientists who developed a consensus on information content and reliability. ^[1]