I met my wife and started a family in the Yukon, so you could say the North is in our family’s blood now. At this moment, I have a daughter working in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, another in Nuuk, Greenland and another planning a return to Inuvik, where she lived and worked before returning to school.

My own career has revolved around talking, writing and communicating about Arctic challenges and how they are connected to the global environmental issues we all face. At its most fundamental, in one way or another, all my work has been about helping people to tell their stories.

One of the most successful and most absorbing projects I’ve worked on at GRID-Arendal is Many Strong Voices which links the Arctic and Small Island Developing States in the Pacific and Caribbean – regions where people really are at the front lines of climate change. At first glance, you might not think there’s much in common between these remote regions. They are different in climate, history, culture, and geographically separated by vast distances. However, you only have to bring people from these regions together to tell their stories, to each other and to the world, to realize the connections. People in both regions are intimately connected to their environments and rely on the resources of the land and sea for their food, well-being and cultural survival. Their worlds are changing and as they try to adapt they have much to teach us.

IW:LEARN

Siri Olsson

EU-MERCES webinar series