Understanding the multiple ways by which humans benefit from ecosystems, and how the impacts of climate change and other human-caused pressures on ecosystems impact human well-being, is vital to inform sustainability actions.

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In Canada and the Arctic, ecosystems and the changes impacting them have been studied extensively, but few studies explicitly assessed Arctic and/or marine ecosystem services or drew clear connections between ecological changes and their impact on human communities. In a paper from my PhD, I showed that there was a lot of research on the impacts of climate change on Arctic marine ecosystems, and a fair amount on social impacts from climate change, such as the direct impacts of sea ice change on people’s ability to safely travel, but very little research explored the connections between ecosystem changes and human well-being through ecosystem services. Drawing on novel approaches and fundamental guidelines for assessing ecosystem services and their resilience, such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, my research aims to unravel how local and global communities benefit from northern and marine ecosystem services, and how to foster the resilience of these ecosystem services in the Anthropocene