RETRACE Project: How to Enhance Resilience to Climate Risks in Pacific and Arctic Indigenous Communities?

ABSTRACT Risk management has evolved to analyze risks in a systemic way, integrating local knowledge with the abstract concept of resilience, which is now an imperative for vulnerable and exposed communities. However, existing decision‐support tools are mainly focused on technical‐functional aspects and, although based on rigorous and scientific approaches, those tools often fail to capture the nuanced lived realities of local communities. Inclusive approaches for developing and implementing resilience strategies are therefore imperative for enhancing the resilience of local communities to climate risks. In response, the RETRACE project started in June 2024, funded by the Belmont Forum, the Joint Programming Initiatives Connecting Climate Knowledge for Europe (JPI Climate), the Cultural Heritage and Global Change (JPI CH), the National Research Council of Norway, the National Science Foundation of the USA, and the French National Funding Agency. In this project, researchers believe that some pillars of local resilience include experience as well as intergenerational, traditional, vernacular, and local knowledge. Revealing perceptions of various forms of local, intrinsic, and cultural resiliencies and integrating them into decision‐support tools are not only central to understanding the complexity of resilience but also encourage the adoption of such tools. The RETRACE project focuses on two geographical areas that have been identified as most vulnerable to climate risks: the polar zones and the Pacific islands, and works with communities within these areas with strong cultural dimensions and histories of resilience: the Marquesan (French Polynesia), the Ahtna of Alaska, and rural, coastal communities in Northern Norway. The project aims to support and learn from long‐term resilience strategies to climate risks in the study communities and to ensure the reproducibility of the methodology. The ambition is to design a decision support tool that enables the visualization, understanding, and implementation of resilience strategies that can be readily adapted to local issues. This project protocol paper aims to present the challenges the project is facing, as well as the first steps in the chosen methodology and the results expected at the end of the project. As a project protocol paper, this article seeks to explain the theoretical positions and the defined methodology. Furthermore, this 3‐year project plans several long missions for all case studies, with field missions spread over the next 3 years. Therefore, this protocol research paper presents also the expected results of the project.