Indicators of food and water security in an Arctic Health context – results from an international workshop discussion

Berner, James; Dudarev, Alexey A.; Mulvad, Gert; Odland, Jon Øyvind; Parkinson, Alan J.; Rautio, Arja; Tikhonov, Constantine; Evengård, Birgitta

doi:10.3402/ijch.v72i0.21530

Cited by 22 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…It was a collaboration between the Arctic Human Health Expert Group, (AHHEG) and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) within the Arctic Council. The workshop held in December 2012, aimed at identifying universal, accessible, and informative summary measures to demonstrate temporal changes in food and water security in the Arctic population [52]. The indicators of food and water security in an Arctic health context measured these temporal changes.…”

Section: Availability and Affordability Of Food In The Barents Regionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These indicators can be measured for the countries of the Barents region; they promote the proportion of traditional foods in diet and the non-monetary accessibility to food when the indigenous population of this region are considered. The identified alternative measures of non-monetary food accessibility discussed were: the presence of hunter/fisher/collector/herder in families/households, accessibility of hunting/fishing/collecting/herding equipment, accessibility of sufficient hunting/fishing/collecting/herding land areas, environmental conditions suitable for hunting/fishing/collecting/herding, and the coping strategies to obtain traditional foods [52]. The other important indicators that promotes food security include healthy weight, monetary food costs, food-borne diseases, and food-related contaminants.…”

Section: Availability and Affordability Of Food In The Barents Regionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Food and Nutrition Security as a Measure of Resilience in the Barents Region

Raheem

2018

Urban Science

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Food and nutrition security builds resilience in a society when people have access to safe and nutritious foods. The Barents region, covering the Northern parts of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, and the North-western part of Russia, seeks common goals that include the well-being of the region's inhabitants by ensuring preservation of local culture and social and environmental sustainability. This paper reviews existing literature on food and nutrition security in relation to building resilience and promoting well-being in the region. Amongst the local communities, traditional foods have served as a major source of healthy diet that ensures food security. Access to secure, nutritious, and healthy food is one of the aspects offering greater human security and societal stability. Traditional food has served as a major source of healthy diet, in particular, in the remote sparsely populated Barents region and amongst the local communities of the region. However, there is concern about global climate change and its effect on the region and pollution from human activities, such as the extractive industrial activities, that are detrimental to safe and secure food supply chain. In this paper, I highlight the contribution of traditional foods to food security in the Barents region. In addition, the paper emphasized that value addition to these traditional foods will help to stimulate the economy by creating new jobs. Ultimately, ensuring food and nutrition security in a sustainable way within the region will help to build resilience and promote culture and ecology with a view to offering greater human and societal security.

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Section: Availability and Affordability Of Food In The Barents Regionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Availability and Affordability Of Food In The Barents Regionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Food and Nutrition Security as a Measure of Resilience in the Barents Region

Raheem

2018

Urban Science

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“…The emissions of air pollutants and wastewater discharge will increase and mostly be emitted around existing industrial sites and human settlements. Due to the environmental disruptions of traditional sources of food and water, circumpolar communities have become increasingly vulnerable to economic insecurity [47]. Morozova et al [48], Erokhin [49], and Liefert and Liefert [50] reported degrading purchasing power of population in Russia, which resulted in the redistribution of family means in favor of food, as well as a shift to less expensive food products and more affordable sources of proteins of lower quality and nutrition value [51,52].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Capturing a Complexity of Nutritional, Environmental, and Economic Impacts on Selected Health Parameters in the Russian High North

Tianming

Erokhin

2020

Sustainability

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The rapid pace of economic exploration of the Arctic against the backdrop of progressing environmental change put a high priority on improving understanding of health impacts in the northern communities. Deficiencies in the capability to capture the complexity of health-influencing parameters along with a lack of observations in circumpolar territories present major challenges to establishing credible projections of disease incidence across varying northern environments. It is thus crucial to reveal the relative contributions of coacting factors to provide a basis for sustainable solutions in the sphere of public health. In order to better understand the adverse effects associated with public health, this study employed six-stage multiple regression analysis of incidence rates of fourteen diseases (International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) codes most widespread in the Russian Arctic) against a set of environmental, nutritional, and economic variables. Variance inflationary factor and best-subsets regression methods were used to eliminate collinearity between the parameters of regression models. To address the diversity of health impacts across northern environments, territories of the Arctic zone of Russia were categorized as (1) industrial sites, (2) urban agglomerations, (3) rural inland, and (4) coastline territories. It was suggested that, in Type 1 territories, public health parameters were most negatively affected by air and water pollution, in Type 2 territories—by low-nutrient diets, in Type 3 and Type 4 territories—by economic factors. It was found that in the Western parts of the Russian Arctic, poor quality of running water along with low access to the quality-assured sources of water might increase the exposure to infectious and parasitic diseases and diseases of the circulatory, respiratory, and genitourinary systems. Low living standards across the Russian Arctic challenged the economic accessibility of adequate diets. In the cities, the nutritional transition to low-quality cheap market food correlated with a higher incidence of digestive system disorders, immune diseases, and neoplasms. In indigenous communities, the prevalence of low diversified diets based on traditional food correlated with the increase in the incidence rates of nutritional and metabolic diseases.

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“…Hydroclimatic changes in the high‐latitude region, including both surface air temperature ( T ) and the water variables of precipitation ( P ), evapotranspiration ( ET ), and runoff ( R ), can lead to ecosystem regime shifts (Karlsson et al, ; Wrona et al, ); infrastructure damages (Instanes et al, ); and critical changes to water resources (Nilsson, Berner et al, ), water security (Bring, Jarsjö, & Destouni, ), and health (Daley et al, ; Evengard et al, ; Martin et al, ). Furthermore, local changes propagate with R and ET to affect the ocean (Carmack et al, ), atmosphere (Vihma et al, ), vegetation (Pearson et al, ), sedimentation rates and fish migration (Chalov et al, ), carbon releases from thawed permafrost (Schuur et al, ), and ocean‐biomass production by waterborne nutrient loading from land to sea (Prowse et al, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contrasting Hydroclimatic Model‐Data Agreements Over the Nordic‐Arctic Region

et al. 2019

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Rapid changes in high-latitude hydroclimate have important implications for human societies and environment. Previous studies of different regions have indicated better agreement between climate model results and observation data for the thermodynamic variable of surface air temperature (T) than for the water variables of precipitation (P), evapotranspiration (ET), and runoff (R). Here we compare climate model output with observations for 64 Nordic and Arctic hydrological basins of different sizes, and for the whole region combined. We find an unexpectedly high agreement between models and observations for R, about as high as the model-observation agreement for T and distinctly higher than that for P or ET. Model-observation agreement for R and T is also consistently higher on the whole-region scale than individual basin scales. In contrast, model-observation agreement for P and ET is overall lower, and for some error measures also lower for the whole region than for individual basins of various scales. Region-specific soil freeze-thaw bias of climate models can at least partly explain the low model-observation agreement for P and ET, while leaving modeled R relatively unaffected. Thereby, model projections for this region may be similarly reliable and directly useful for large-scale average conditions of R as of T.Plain Language Summary Climate is changing more rapidly in the Arctic than in many other places on Earth. To understand and project how the Arctic climate is changing, we use computer models that simulate the climate system. Often, such models are reported to perform better for simulations of temperature than for simulations of water, such as rain, snow, or river flow. They are often also reported to be better at large scales than at small scales. In our research, we have studied how well climate model results agree with meteorological observations, by studying data for 64 different rivers in the Nordic and Arctic regions. Contrary to what we expected, we found that models were about as good in simulating river flow as they were in simulating temperature and clearly better than they were at simulating rain and snow. For simulations of river flow and temperature, models were better at larger scales than smaller scales. Our results mean that it may be possible to use these models for understanding and projecting river flows with a similar reliability as for temperature for this region, at least on large scales.

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Indicators of food and water security in an Arctic Health context – results from an international workshop discussion

Cited by 22 publications

References 22 publications

Food and Nutrition Security as a Measure of Resilience in the Barents Region

Food and Nutrition Security as a Measure of Resilience in the Barents Region

Capturing a Complexity of Nutritional, Environmental, and Economic Impacts on Selected Health Parameters in the Russian High North

Contrasting Hydroclimatic Model‐Data Agreements Over the Nordic‐Arctic Region

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