This 21-chapter edited volume is a synthesis of papers presented at an international conference on ‘Arctic Alpine Ecosystems and People in a Changing Environment,’ held in Norway in early 2003. The conference, held with the support of the European Commission as a EURO-CONFERENCE, was further comprised of, in most cases concluding, meetings of several other international bodies, programmes, or collaborating groups — ENVINET (the European Network for Arctic-Alpine Multidisciplinary Environmental Research), NARP (the Nordic Arctic Research Programme), the Ny-Ålesund Large Scale Facility, the Arctic Seas Consortium, and the EU project UVAC (the influence of UV-radiation and climate conditions on fish stocks). Having such a complex genesis is both a strength and a weakness for the volume. The material covered is strongly multidisciplinary in nature, while some of the individual chapters provide authoritative and accessible reviews or treatments of their subject matter, making the volume a valuable literature resource.
The individual chapters are grouped into four major sections. The first of these provides general introductory background and includes two chapters, the first giving an overview of the major aspects of environmental change and pollutant transport, and the second placing change in the context of Arctic indigenous peoples. Both provide useful and necessary background information, while also implicitly bringing to the reader's attention a challenge that is often shelved in the scientific community — that of integrating what might be seen as the remote and objective treatment of purely scientific questions with the more sociobiological approach to the actual or potential societal impacts of the problems addressed. To this reviewer — admittedly a member of the former community — while the challenge is there, this volume largely fails to bring the two communities closer together, as their approaches remain very different and their conclusions appear to be based on very different evidential foundations.
The second section comprises eight chapters grouped under the heading ‘Climate change and ecosystem response.’ The individual chapter subjects range from climate description, through impacts on lake ecosystems, growing seasons, plant distributions and responses to local scale variability, to marine oceanic currents and food web impacts and, finally, social responses. Chapter 3 opens the section with a clear general overview of observed and model predictions of climate variation in the European Arctic. However, it ducks acknowledging a general weakness of the current generation of models in that they fail to recreate the ‘known’ climate record without the use of forcing, and includes an example (Fig. 3.5) of what would seem a logically somewhat dubious approach of averaging different model outputs — the picture produced can be attractive in terms of confirming expectation, but the justification of treating the different model outputs as completely independent data points is far from clear. The section contains some weaker chapters. For instance, Chapter 5 does not seem to be well balanced with many of the other volume chapters, essentially being a short data analysis paper based on only a maximum 17-year time series (in some cases much less) — a real constraint faced by many climate-change researchers, but that must weaken both any evidence found and the conclusions drawn. Chapter 10, looking at the societal responses to climate change in Greenland, lacks depth and draws conclusions on the causes of historical biological trends in certain target-species numbers that appear to fail to be based on full objective consideration, largely ignoring the impacts of humans themselves on these species. Overall, however, the chapters within this section do provide much useful overview information.
The third section of six chapters covers ‘UV radiation and biological effects.’ The section opens with a somewhat disappointing treatment of physical factors underlying the transmission of UV radiation through the atmosphere. In particular, this chapter has insufficient linkage to the much larger body of literature existing on this subject, while also missing the opportunity to at least introduce the extensive and sometimes controversial subject of biological weighting functions. Although mentioning ‘scenarios’ in its title, this subject (probably the most pertinent for the general reader) is given only four short and superficial sentences in the chapter's conclusions. This section, and chapters 12–15 in particular, most clearly illustrate the problem of excessive overlap between chapters. The background information given in these chapters, while valuable, with stronger editorial control could have been given once. Chapter 14 is particularly well written in this respect, and is one of the few chapters in the volume that illustrates the benefits of drawing in relevant studies from wider geographic areas (particularly from both polar regions) and timescales. Had this chapter been placed first in the section, much of the text of the remaining chapters could have been edited down. The final chapter in the section seems somewhat out of place in this volume. It is again repetitive in parts of the physical information already given, while also including little explicit attempt to draw relevance to the health of Arctic or Alpine human populations.
The final set of five chapters addresses ‘Long range pollutants transport and ecological impacts.’ This is, again, an important subject, but the reader is left with a feeling that the individual chapter treatments are rather more ‘patchy’ than their titles would suggest. Thus, the ‘contaminants’ of Chapter 17 turn out to be mostly ‘semi-volatile organic contaminants,’ while Chapter 18, which appears to promise a general treatment of long-range transport in the Arctic, focuses on specific sources in the former Soviet Union, while also making little effort to place its discussion within the volume's ‘changing environment’ remit. Chapters 19 and 20 provide another example of a missed opportunity for editorial combination — in essence the former provides little more than an extended introduction for the latter, while the chapters completely fail to cross reference each other. If concisely edited together, the single resulting chapter would have provided a very useful overview. Contaminant-monitoring provides another area where integration of available material from both polar regions would be advantageous — while the Antarctic is at least mentioned in passing, it seems surprising that one of the more up-to-date and comprehensive literature sources relating to environmental contamination at the ‘other’ pole (Bargagli Reference Bargagli2005) does not merit a single mention here. The final chapter, as earlier with chapter 10, attempts to provide a human dimension within this section, but again does not sit comfortably, lacking the same objectivity and in places reading as little more than a series of polemical opinions. Again, I feel the editors have missed the chance to integrate effectively the work presented in the volume. In terms of scientific content, part of chapter 21 really belongs as a short subsection within the preceding chapter while, if the remainder were combined with the current chapter 10, and much more attention paid to objectivity, the result would have been a far more credible text relating to the societal consequences of environmental change.
As can be a danger with such large syntheses from multi-organisation meetings, many of the chapters read as fragmentary or overlapping in content. This leaves the reader with an unsatisfactory perception that the structure of the volume was driven by some requirement that each meeting presentation must have its own chapter, and a feeling that stronger editorial control, including combining parts of the contents of certain chapters and even leaving some out altogether, would have resulted in a more accessible volume with much clearer logical flow and development. As the chapters are written, in several cases each has its own very limited geographical coverage, even in the context of the extent of the Arctic region. These would often have benefited from a better effort at overview, in particular in integrating evidence more widely from within the Arctic, and in several cases in drawing in comparative and highly relevant literature from the Antarctic. In terms of presentation, there are also weaknesses throughout the volume in formatting, and typographic and linguistic errors, while in places the literature cited has not been brought up to date, as should be expected for a volume with a 2007 publication date (for example, in Chapter 2, the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, published in 2005, is cited as ‘in press’). Such individually trivial weaknesses will be frustrating for the knowledgeable audience that the volume must be aimed at, and detract from the genuinely valuable information contained.
