Goals and Philosophy

One of the major challenges facing humanity is to sustain the desirable features of Earth's ecosystems and society at a time of rapid changes in all of the major forces that shape their structure and functioning. The University of Alaska Fairbanks offers the Resilience and Adaptation Program to educate scholars, policy-makers, indigenous leaders, and managers to address these issues in an integrated fashion. The program integrates the tools and approaches of several fields, including ecology, resource management, climate dynamics, economics, anthropology, political science, philosophy, and community and regional development to understand the functioning of social-ecological systems. Our underlying assumptions are: The major problems facing the world must be addressed to account for local-global interactions, and no solution will be tenable unless it is ecologically, economically, and culturally sustainable. The program emphasizes high-latitude ecosystems, where current management issues require an application of the integrated understanding of these disciplines. This approach is, however, equally applicable to all developing and developed nations, and we welcome students who seek to apply this training to any region of the globe.

This graduate-training program will train a new generation of scholars, policy makers, and managers to integrate the perspectives of natural and social sciences in addressing both the basic understanding of regional systems and the application of this understanding to management issues. The goal of the program is to educate scholars, policy makers, and managers that are well-grounded in one or more disciplines but have an understanding and research experience in a range of natural and social sciences. The program provides training to graduate students from the University of Alaska and to students enrolled in other universities who wish to enroll in one year of intensive course work at the University of Alaska. It provides course work and a seminar program that integrates ecology, economics, and anthropology in a systems-modeling framework and provides faculty mentorship and internships in areas outside of each student's parent discipline. The program emphasize cross-cultural communication through heavy partnerships with Alaskan indigenous communities and with managers, businesses, and conservation groups.

Our goal is to give scientists, policy makers, and managers a foundation in one or more disciplines and give them an understanding of, and research experience in, a range of natural and social sciences. We feel that students must be well grounded in a particular discipline to provide them with a depth of expertise that they can bring to an interdisciplinary research effort. In addition, they must have strong disciplinary tools and experience that give them the necessary credentials to obtain jobs and get options of pursuing disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary opportunities in today's academic environment. We seek to build on this disciplinary training that students will receive in their home departments by exposing them to interdisciplinary research. Each student will conduct sufficient research in a discipline different from their parent discipline that they will be familiar with some of the important philosophy, tools, and approaches of that discipline.