Scenarios development with Alaska’s Arctic Indigenous youth: perceptions of healthy sustainable futures in the Northwest Arctic Borough

Abstract

ABSTRACT How do arctic youth perceive the resilience of their communities? Many of today’s high school students in Arctic Alaska will takeup leadership roles in their communities in the next decade. The social-environmental changes these communities face are disruptive andpose challenges to local governance now and into the future. Arctic Futures Makers (AFM) was a scenarios workshop of 22 Alaska Indigenoushigh school students convened over two days in February 2016 on the resilience of the Northwest Arctic Borough’s communities in light ofclimate and development changes. The scope of the scenarios workshop focused on defining factors the students felt were key to the futureof healthy and sustainable communities. The intent was to understand how potential leaders perceived the futures of their communities andtheir own role in the changing dynamics of the Arctic. Three findings are significant to explain how these youth think about themselves andtheir region’s future: (1) high school students’ results are similar to those of adults in similar workshops but with important differencesrelated to what makes a community ‘livable’ (2) students were initially reticent to imagine multiple possible futures (3) students’ perceptionsof their own communities’ resilience changed after the workshop experience.