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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how synthetic knowing emerges through monitoring and forecasting climate related hazards in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, enabling anticipatory decision making while reshaping how gradually unfolding environmental risks are understood and governed.

Paper long abstract

Preventing and mitigating the effects of global climate change is among the defining challenges of our time. Longyearbyen, Svalbard is an Arctic settlement located in one of the world’s most rapidly warming regions, where climate change manifests through an increasing range of natural hazards, including permafrost thaw, landslides, rockslides, slushflow avalanches, snow avalanches, river flooding, increased sediment flow from melting glaciers, groundwater pollution, and coastal erosion. These developments are driving the rapid reconfiguration of local risk governance practices that must generate, synthesize, and act upon diverse forms of environmental knowledge derived from observations, sensors, and simulation data. In this context, monitoring and forecasting become synthetic practices that bring together heterogeneous data sources, disciplinary expertise, and technological infrastructures in order to anticipate and respond to emerging risks. Drawing on four years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with researchers and stakeholders involved in multidisciplinary projects in Longyearbyen over the past decade, this article examines how such knowledge practices are assembled and mobilized to support decision making under conditions of accelerating environmental change. In doing so, it highlights how anticipatory practices challenge established epistemic and ontological frames by reconfiguring how gradually unfolding environmental phenomena are known, interpreted, and governed.