Climate change in the Arctic: an Inuit reality.

• Author: Smith, Duane

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) characterizes the circumpolar Arctic as the world's climate change "barometer". The 160,000 Inuit who live in northern Canada, Greenland, Alaska and Chukotka in Russia have witnessed the changing of the natural environment as a result of global warming for almost 20 years.

It is important that you know what climate change does and means to us, for what we are experiencing now will happen to the further South in a few short years. I live in Inuvik, well above the Arctic circle, on the Mackenzie River delta in Canada's northwest territories. About 4,000 people live in Inuvik--the northern headquarters of oil and gas development in the Beaufort Sea region. The circumpolar Arctic is not isolated anymore; globalization has reached it. The South is hungry for our oil, gas and minerals, with exploration proceeding quickly in many parts of the Arctic. The United States Geological Survey believes that 25 per cent of the world's remaining oil and gas is located here. Northern Canada is the world's third largest producer of gem diamonds; great reserves of base and precious metals and coal have been found in the North. In the last 40 to 50 years, Inuit have adjusted to social, economic and cultural changes. But even as we adapt to globalization, we realize that climate moderation is likely to be the key driver of socio-economic and cultural changes in years ahead.

In 1999, the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development and the community of Sachs Harbour (with about 125 people), on Banks Island in the Beaufort Sea region, documented local and regional environmental changes. In a video shown at the 2000 Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), hunters and elders spoke with quiet authority about: commonplace and cumulative changes; melting permafrost, resulting in beach slumping and lake erosions; increased snowfalls; longer sea ice-free seasons; emerging or invasive new species of birds, fish and insects (barn owls, mallard, pin-tailed ducks and salmon) near the community; a decline in the lemming population (a basic food for Arctic fox and a staple species); and a general warming trend.

These changes are not unique to my region. They are also reported by Inuit in Greenland and Alaska, Saami in northern Norway, Aleut in the Aleutian Islands, Athabaskans and Gwich'in in North America, Nenets, Chukchi and many other...