María Gústavsdóttir


María Gústavsdóttir

I am a nurse and work in the Emergency Department at Landspítali – The National University Hospital of Iceland. Alongside this, I have volunteered with ICE-SAR rescue teams for around a decade and am currently completing a master’s degree in Disaster Management at the University of Copenhagen. In my final project, I examine different approaches to strengthening response capacity in rural areas of the Arctic.

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Growing international interest in the Arctic, together with residents’ desire to become more self-reliant in emergency response, has put pressure on authorities to strengthen response capacity and reduce waiting times for emergency assistance in rural areas. My final project, Localizing Emergency Response in Greenland: A Scoping Review of Arctic Approaches, provides an overview of how first response is organised outside urban areas in Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Svalbard, Nunavut and Alaska, with the aim of strengthening emergency response in Greenland. The presentation will cover the main findings and key considerations when it comes to bridging the response capacity gap in the Arctic.