I am a PhD candidate within the project 'Tipping the iceberg: leveraging a food transition for indigenous communities in the Bering Sea'.

The project adopts a complex systems perspective to identify leverage points in the marine-based Arctic indigenous food system on the Pribilof Islands. We take a highly participatory approach and establish a Transformation Lab on St. Paul and St. George Island that involves and empowers community members to identify transformation pathways towards a sustainable future. To gain a systemic understanding of the food system's current structure, we construct a multiple-layer social-ecological network model and analyze interdependencies between key actors of the system and prevailing sustainability issues. We then combine natural and social sciences and explore how the food system is influenced by changes in people's values and paradigms from the past until today. In close collaboration with the local community, we develop positive scenarios of the future food system and pathways towards a more sustainable system state. These pathways are then tested using agent-based modelling to capture the system's dynamics and inform the community's actual interventions. The project aims to gain a holistic understanding of the social-ecological system to identify interdependencies and feedbacks between humans and nature and find key leverage points for sustainability transformation.