View article

Several recent climate impact assessments on polar regions have been undertaken, including the synthesis report on Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic (AMAP, 2011a), the State of the Arctic Coast 2010 (2011) reports, the Antarctic Climate and the Environment (Turner et al., 2009, 2013), Arctic Resilience Interim Report 2013 (2013), and the findings of the International Polar Year (IPY; Krupnick et al., 2011). These reports draw a consistent pattern of climate-driven environmental, societal, and economic changes in the polar regions in recent decades. In this chapter, we use the scientific literature, including these reports, to consolidate the assessment of the impacts of climate change on polar regions from 2007, advance new scientific evidence of impacts, and identify key gaps in knowledge on current and future impacts. Previous IPCC reports define the Arctic as the area within the Arctic Circle (66ºN …