Back to the future : Detecting past Arctic environmental change and investing in future observations

• Main Authors: Callaghan, Terry V., Johansson, Margareta, Matveyeva, Nadya
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis 2018
• Subjects: Climate Research; Arctic; Climate change; Lapland
• Online Access: https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/bae0ccc4-4a64-41d9-91f6-e9b460e8bc02

This chapter describes the Back to the Future (BTF) approach with illustrations of different data sets and their conclusions and stimulates the growth of such studies. The BTF Project included several studies that "discovered" old data sets, digitized them, carried out analyses and made data and analyses available in publications. An important aspect of the BTF approach is that the evidence of changes–or no changes–is determined independently of the climate change issue as the original sites, paintings, photographs, and data sets were established before the climate change paradigm predominated. Even though the intentions of the photographs were not to record the environments for future reference, backgrounds and foregrounds in many photos provide good evidence of past environments. The photographs were taken at the end of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century and many show important environmental details in an area of Swedish Lapland where development has not obscured the field of view of the photographs.