UMass INFORMS Speaker Series - Talk by Dr. Thomas Sharkey

The Arctic has been experiencing significantly longer ice-free, navigable maritime seasons, thereby changing the types of activities taking place in Arctic waters. Cruise ships are travelling through the Northwest Passage, oil exploration is occurring off the North Slope of Alaska, and the Northern Sea Route is seeing an increasing volume of cargo ships travelling through it. In Arctic Alaska, these tourism and industrial activities will occur far away from the infrastructure and resources of urban and industrial centers, limiting response capabilities when an emergency occurs in Arctic waters. For all of these reasons, there is a critical need to improve Emergency Response in the Arctic (ERA) to meet the increase in the demand for these capabilities. We are creating new Operations Research (OR) models that not only account for where and when to make investments to improve ERA capabilities but how to make these investments in order to benefit local Arctic communities. In this talk, OR models to assess gaps in response capabilities for mass rescue events from stranded cruise ships and oil spill response in remote regions will be discussed. The focus will then turn to a discussion of how community-based participatory research is being used to identify infrastructure that improves ERA and benefits local communities, which will be critical in constructing OR models to guide investments in a manner that responsibly considers the impacts of these investments on Arctic communities.