Welcome to the CHARTER research project web page. CHARTER was a 4 year, 5.9M Euro project is managed by the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland, Finland and was funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovations Programme (Grant #869471). The Project Leader was Prof. Bruce Forbes. The pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine severely curtailed work plans at the outset, but the project altered course and achieved its stated objectives and more. Public deliverables are here, scientific publications are here, 2 pager policy briefs in four languages are here and a collection of CHARTER related StoryMaps are here. CHARTER involved 21 research institutions across 9 countries. See the full list on our Partners page. The project ran from 2020 to early 2025.

Here you will find out what this project was about, the research institutions involved and who the people and communities doing the work were. The name CHARTER was derived from the research project title: Drivers and Feedbacks of Changes in Arctic Terrestrial Biodiversity. You can read summaries of the CHARTER project in the following languages: Russian, Finnish, Swedish, North Sámi, Inari Sámi, Nenets, German, French and Bulgarian.

CHARTER was an ambitious effort to advance the adaptive capacity of Arctic communities to climatic and biodiversity changes through state-of-the-art synthesis based on thorough data collection, analysis and modelling of Arctic change with major socio-economic implications and feedbacks.

To achieve this goal, CHARTER combined expertise from Earth System sciences and biodiversity studies within a social-ecological system (SES) framework and with strong participatory approaches. Strategies co-developed in CHARTER with indigenous and local communities comprised synergies between their ambitions for adaptation actions with novel forms of land management geared towards climate change mitigation and sustainable development.

CHARTER was made up of seven transdisciplinary Work Packages (WPs) to address three central aims:

1) Work with Arctic communities to co-develop strategies and policy pathways for livelihoods such as herding, hunting and fishing, that reflect, and enhance adaptation to, the changing Arctic (WP 1-6).

2) Project, and simulate the effects of social-ecological changes for linked indigenous and local communities and traditional livelihoods, particularly reindeer herding and hunting (WP 3 and 5).

3) Understand the responses of Arctic terrestrial systems to changes in the cryosphere (e.g. permafrost, snow and sea ice cover, and rain-on-snow (ROS) events), biodiversity and their feedbacks and interactions, using observations at decadal (WPs 1 and 4), centennial (WP4) and recent (WP1) time scales.