Meet the PCAPS SG: Machiel Lamers on understanding the safety and sustainability of environmental services in the polar regions
This month’s Meet the SG blog post features PCAPS SG member, Machiel Lamers. Machiel is an environmental sociologist fascinated by the mobile character of tourism activities in the polar regions, along with other activities like fisheries or science operations, and the ways in which their flexibility and agility can both be shaped through environmental information services as well as lead to sustainability and safety implications. Machiel has recently been appointed Professor in Tourism and Environmental Change at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, where he focuses on the governance of sustainable tourism in some of the world's most fragile and remote destinations, including both polar regions.
Machiel at Deception Island, South Shetland Islands, Antarctica (January, 2024). Photo courtesy of Machiel Lamers.
I am currently leading the international ANTARC-SHIP (2023-2027) and the TRANS-ACT projects (2026-2028), both funded by the Dutch Research Council, that focus on the drivers, impacts and regulation of Antarctic tourism.
In the coming years, I will continue to conduct collaborative research on the steering capacity, the opportunities and the impacts of emerging information technologies and systems (e.g. environmental forecasting, monitoring systems), which can enable and constrain transnational (tourism) mobility in the polar regions.
Around 10 years ago, I was asked to join the Social and Economic Research Applications Task Team of the Polar Prediction Project (PPP-SERA), one of the flagship projects of the World Weather Research Programme (WWRP) of the WMO. I soon became one of the co-chairs of PPP-SERA as well as a steering group member of PPP.
The polar regions are among the most rapidly warming areas on Earth. It is expected that the changing climate will attract new maritime sectors in the polar regions, such as cruise tourism, fishing and freight transport. To respond to these developments, scientists, local communities, shipping industries and government agencies are calling for the improvement of information systems that can better predict weather and ice conditions. To achieve this, in addition to advances in polar meteorology, there is an increasingly important role for the social sciences.
During PPP, I led the SALIENSEAS project, a trans-disciplinary project involving social scientists, meteorologists and oceanographers who, in collaboration with representatives from the Arctic cruise sector, local fisheries and freight transport, developed new sea ice forecasting services. Sociological perspectives of social practices and mobilities played an important role in understanding the social, spatial and temporal context in which sea ice information is used in the decision-making of captains, expedition leaders or Inuit fishermen.
Based on these insights, we developed a serious game capable of simulating, testing and evaluating the use and value of a new sea ice forecast with ship captains active in the Arctic. This has allowed us to analyze the use of this information service in the specific context of Arctic mobility practice, bridging the experiential gap between developers and users of forecasting services, and enriching the co-production process (see Blair et al., 2022).
Machiel at Port Charcot, Antarctic Peninsula (January, 2024). Photo courtesy of Machiel Lamers.
In a recent commentary in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), looking back on the social science achievements during PPP, we argued that in order to raise the societal value of polar environmental services, we need:
to better understand the diversity of highly specific user contexts;
to tailor the actionability of weather, water, ice and climate (WWIC) service development in the polar regions through inclusive transdisciplinary approaches to co-production;
to assess the societal impact of improved environmental services in the polar regions; and
to invest and provide dedicated funding for involving the social sciences in research and tailoring processes across all the polar regions (see Lamers et al. 2024).
I am proud to have been at the cradle of the PCAPS project, designing its inclusive structure and championing for a more prominent position of the actionability and impact of environmental services, as well as the role of the social sciences.
For example, I lead the Sustainability & Impact PCAPS Task Team, a group of social scientists and environmental scientists aiming to understand the impacts of enhanced environmental services to communities and mobile operators in the polar regions. These societal effects are currently not well understood nor systematically investigated. Positive impacts include reducing risks to maritime businesses and local communities, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from shipping, and increasing the decision-making power of local communities.
However, there are also societal challenges, such as the growing information inequality between businesses and local communities or users, the promotion of unsustainable sectors, and the creation of a false sense of security due to improved forecasting services. Forecasting services can, for example, increase opportunities for large-scale shipping or extractive industries in vulnerable ecological or socio-cultural areas.
I look forward to continuing our collaborative work as part of PCAPS in the coming years!