Globally Warmed Polar Communities Face Growing Shift in Traditional Lifestyle with Limited Adaptive Capacity: Federal Action Necessary

by Kathryn Fitzgerald

For thousands of years, the Aboriginal communities of northern Canada have continued peacefully to live within means and traditions of their naturally-subsistent heritage, preserved within an age-old value set of community interdependence, family bonds, ritual and health aspects, and a give/take relationship with their polar environment (3).  Their very identity is engrained within this system, which has prevailed even throughout the past half a century of settling into more stationary and modern settlements than traditional migratory lifestyles (4).  However, rate of development and introduction of wage-based industry within these communities have been implemented in large part through citizens’ own accord in response to the times, and they still remain close-knit with core values of natural subsistence. 

With the recent upsurge of climate impacts due to global warming, high-latitude polar regions being the most sensitive to changes in temperature and insolation have seen significant environmental shifts.  These vulnerable regions experience increasingly warmer weather year-round, longer summers and shorter winter ice season, raising sea level, severe and uncharacteristic weather and storm events, shoreline erosion and thawing permafrost (3).  Each of these singularly and cumulatively altars lifestyle practices, two being hunting practices and inhabitance of coastal locations. 

Land and sea-based arctic wildlife follow specific migratory patterns that polar citizens have depended on throughout their history for hunting and fishing (3).  Warming ecosystems have disrupted these cycles by shortening the ice season and shifting vegetation zones northward, thus expelling certain crucial species like reindeer and caribou from usual hunting areas and forcing hunters to spend precious time, effort, and finances to keep up as well as to distribute throughout their community (4).  The tradition of hunting is imperative to the lifestyle nutritionally, occupationally, socially and traditionally. 

Polar communities typically locate themselves by the coasts for food, transportation, and utility of water (1).  Shoreline erosion due to thawing permafrost is hugely detrimental to the structural foundation of these communities.  Before the modern lifestyle shift toward more permanent communities, this issue could have been evaded by migration patterns in alignment with those of animals (3).  Now, however, they struggle between the limitations of both their traditional and modernizing means of living.

Environmental effects of warming have shown effects of physical and mental health on some members of northern Canadian communities, which are projected to increase with further warming trends.  In 2002, Canada’s national Inuit organization, Inuit Tapiriit Kantami, carried out workshops in three communities within the Inuit Settlement Reserve in the Northwest Territories of Canada (4).  The goal was to document and discuss within the communities regional global warming effects and implications and then expand to a national level of progress and understanding.  Such trends found as respiratory stress, increased burns and skin cancer from UV-B exposure, increased accidents and drownings due to poor ice conditions, increased amount and variety of biting insects, and depleted nutrition from hunting difficulties were prevalent throughout the communities (4). 

Also significant was lower communal mental health and well-being due to inability to practice traditional lifestyles naturally and feelings of loss of control during relocation, which has yielded more frequent depression, suicide, substance abuse and the like (1).  Most coping actions against these health-related issues discussed and assessed within the workshops were found to be reactive in nature rather than proactive strategies, thus providing temporary resolution without extending effort to long-term goals and solutions (4).  For example, reactively, resilient hunters would grit through more arduous and frequent trips to provide food for their community when wildlife routes skewed and fewer cold storage areas were available.

Another crucial health-related issue pervasive throughout northern Canada links to water and waste treatment systems.  The quality of any water distribution system depends on the reliability of the source, surface or groundwater, and in general underground systems that require thaw-stable permafrost are more desirable and sanitary than those aboveground (1).  Arctic Canada’s flooding, storms, shoreline erosion and melting permafrost have been undermining the structural foundation of many of these storage and distribution systems, allowing for leaks and destruction that can contaminate water and spreads disease.

The evidence for the sacrifices made daily by northern Canadian communities, both Aboriginal and more modern, is highly unsettling and has accelerated throughout the decade.  Another workshop commissioned in 2005 by Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated (NTI) found that though these communities are strikingly resilient in their reactive day-to-day behavioral shifts and mitigation, it is time for concrete governmental intervention and proactive adaptation from policymakers (2).  Legal agreements, the 1993 Nunavut Land Claim Agreements a prime example, have successfully preserved communities’ well-being through rights to hunting, resources, harvesting and other traditional practices for years.  As these communities must directly face the wrath of nationally overexploited greenhouse gases, it is the government’s duty to continue providing them with a level of security proportionate to their needs. 

Within the community level, members should constantly identify and monitor the effects of climate change presently occurring as well as indicators for future changes, observing such trends as snow and ice thickness, saline content of water, precipitation, surface temperature, rates of erosion, etc (1).  This information, when discussed openly with larger scale community planners and engineers, will allow for replacement of out-dated infrastructure design based on historical data with the new environmental parameters. 

Furthermore, federal policy-makers may learn from the examples of outcomes of similar past instances when addressing present climate issues.  The early-‘90s disappearance of the Atlantic Canadian cod fishery due to over-fishing domestically and internationally to compete for a finite resource instigated a dramatically abrupt environmental and cultural change for subsistence Canadian communities reliant on the cod (2).  This shift could have been lessened or perhaps avoided if the government would have used foresight from data trends of dwindling sources from the previous decades to create proactive adaptation policies.

Similarly, further culture shock from global warming effects in northern Canadian communities may be avoided by proactive policies implemented now to build adaptive capacity and provide aid for future issues while preserving at least a fraction of their traditional lifestyle.  Ultimately, proactive adaptation should save financially, as programs in effect in the future will be covered now, rather than a continual output of resources.  Necessary for future policies will be interdisciplinary approaches from specialists in climate, health, economy etc. to deal with data at national, regional, and local levels (2).  As scientific goals are not always immediately pursued, the policies of adaptive capacity that will appeal the most to government forces will be those that apply sociologically to broad improvement of conditions, such as universal primary education.

References:

1. Warren, J., J. Berner and J. Curtis.  “Climate Change and Human Health: Infrastructure Impacts to Small Remote Communities in the North.”  International Journal of Circumpolar Health, 64.  (2005): 487-497.  Periodical Locator.  Thompson Gale.  JMU Libraries, VA.  18 Nov 2007.

2. Budreau, D., G. McBean.  “Climate Change, Adaptive Capacity and Policy Direction in the Canadian North: Can We Learn Anything from the Collapse of the East Coast Cod Fishery?”  Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 12.7.  (2007): 1305-1320.  Geobase.  Thompson Gale.  JMU Libraries, VA.  18 Nov 2007.

3. The Threat of Climate Change to Arctic Human Communities.  n/d.  Greenpeace USA.  18 Nov 2007 <http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/97/arctic/library/region/people.html>

4. Furgal, C., Seguin, J.  Climate Change, Health, and Vulnerability in Canadian Northern Aboriginal Communities.  Environmental Health Perspectives (2006 December).  18 Nov 2007  <http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1764172>