Arctic peoples' adaption to climate change
Arctic peoples, particularly the Inuit and Eskimo communities, are grappling with the profound impacts of climate change in their regions, which are subject to some of the fastest warming on Earth. With approximately 150,000 individuals living around the Arctic Ocean, traditional hunting practices have become increasingly perilous due to thinning ice and altered weather patterns. Hunters face dangers from unexpectedly unstable ice and changing migratory routes of wildlife, necessitating the adaptation of both techniques and knowledge. As traditional food storage methods become ineffective with rising temperatures, reliance on expensive imported food is growing, leading to health issues such as diabetes. In areas like Shishmaref, Alaska, communities are experiencing severe coastal erosion and are planning costly relocations due to thawing permafrost and rising sea levels. Moreover, cultural practices such as ice hockey have also been affected, with shorter seasons prompting the use of artificial ice and air conditioning in traditional homes. The Inuit are actively engaging in advocacy efforts to protect their rights and way of life, highlighting the urgent need for global action against climate change. As they strive to adapt to these rapid changes, their experiences reflect broader challenges faced by Indigenous populations worldwide in preserving their culture, health, and environment amid a warming climate.
Arctic peoples' adaption to climate change
The lives of approximately 150,000 Inuit and Eskimo who ring the Arctic Ocean in Greenland, Canada’s Arctic, Alaska, and Russia have been substantially changed by some of the most rapid warming on Earth.
Background
Around the Arctic, in Inuit villages connected by the oral history of traveling hunters as well as by e-mail, weather watchers report striking evidence that global warming is an unmistakable reality. Rapid changes have been evident at all seasons. During the summer of 2004, for example, several yellow-jacket wasps (Vespula intermedia) were sighted in Arctic Bay, a community of seven hundred people located on the northern tip of Baffin Island, at more than 73° north latitude. Inuktitut, the Inuit language, has no word for the insect.
Inuit Hunters’ Experiences
The Arctic’s rapid thaw has made hunting, never a safe or an easy way of life, even more difficult and dangerous. Arctic weather has changed significantly since roughly the mid-1990s. Several hunters have fallen through unusually thin ice and sustained severe injuries or died. Changing weather is only one factor. Inuit hunters’ dogs have an ability to detect thin ice, which they may refuse to cross. Snowmobiles, which have replaced dogs for many Inuits, have no such sense. While pack ice was visible from the Alaskan north coast year-round until a few years ago, it has now retreated well over the horizon, forcing hunters to journey more than 160 kilometers offshore to find bearded seals and walruses.
Pitseolak Alainga, an Iqaluit-based hunter, has said that climate change compels caution: One must never hunt alone. Before venturing onto ice in fall or spring, Alainga cautions, hunters should test its stability with a harpoon. Alainga knows the value of safety on the water. His father and five other men died during late October 1994, after an unexpected ice storm swamped their hunting boat. The younger Alainga and one other companion barely escaped death in the same storm. Alainga believes that more hunters are suffering injuries not only because of climate change but also because basic survival skills are not being passed from generation to generation as they were in years past, when most Inuit lived off the land.
Inuit daily life has changed in many other ways because of the rapidly warming climate. Many Inuit once used ice cellars to store meat in frozen ground. The climate has warmed so much that the cellars are no longer safe, even as far north as Barrow, Alaska. Meat that once could be safely stored in has been spoiling. With increasing inability to hunt, Inuit are being forced to buy imported food at prices several times those paid for the same goods at lower latitudes. Diabetes and other problems associated with imported food have been increasing. Drinking water obtained by melting ice has become dirtier. A warmer climate increases risks for insect-vector diseases, even West Nile virus.
By the 2020s, global climate change had continued to significantly affect the hunting practices of Indigenous people. For example, changes in weather patterns shifted the traditional migration patterns of some species, forcing hunters to adapt to new hunting territories. Additionally, many Inuit communities began to rely on specialized sea ice monitoring programs to measure the thickness of Arctic ice, as traditional knowledge proved inadequate as temperatures warmed.
Shishmaref, Alaska
Six hundred Alaskan Native people in the village of Shishmaref, on the far western shore of Alaska about 160 kilometers north of Nome, have been watching their village erode into the sea. The permafrost that once reinforced Shishmaref’s waterfront is thawing. Shishmaref residents decided during July 2002 to move their entire village inland, a project that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimated would cost more than $100 million. By 2001, seawater was lapping near the town’s airport runway, its only long-distance connection to the outside world. By that time, three houses had been washed into the sea. Several more were threatened. The town’s drinking water supply had also been inundated by the sea. By fall 2004, Shismaref’s beaches had retreated still farther during vicious storms. The same storms flooded businesses along the waterfront in Nome and damaged power lines, fuel tanks, and roads in at least a half dozen other coastal villages.
Artificial Hockey Ice and Air Conditioning
By the winter of 2002-2003, warming Arctic temperatures were forcing hockey players in Canada’s far north to seek rinks with artificial ice. Canada’s Financial Post reported that global warming had cut in half the hockey season, which ran from September until May in the 1970s. Instead, the season—dependent in some areas upon natural ice—had come to begin around Christmas and end in March. The northern climate has changed so swiftly that by the summer of 2006, the Inuit were installing air-conditioning in some buildings near the Arctic Circle. Traditional Inuit homes are built with southern exposure to soak up every available hint of the sun’s warmth. Windows are usually small, and they rarely open easily. Some Inuit were developing severe heat rashes during the summer.
Context
The Inuit are very conscious of their pivotal role in a natural world undergoing climate change, as they seek to avoid destruction of an environment that has sustained them for many thousands of years. The Inuit Circumpolar Conference has petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights regarding violations of fundamental human rights among Arctic peoples. The petition defends the rights of Inuits as a people within evolving international human rights law. It seeks a declaration from the commission that emissions of from the United States—the source of more than 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse GHGs during the last century—is violating Inuit human rights as outlined in the 1948 American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man.
The petition asserts that the Inuits’ rights to culture, life, health, physical integrity and security, property, and subsistence have been imperiled by global warming: With accelerating loss of ice and snow, hunting, travel, and other subsistence activities have become more dangerous and in some cases impossible. The petition does not seek monetary damages. Instead, it requests cessation of U.S. actions that violate Inuit rights to live in a cold environment—not a small task, since such action would involve major restructuring of the U.S. economic base to sharply curtail emissions of GHGs. The petition anticipates the types of actions that will have to take place on a worldwide scale, including alterations to the rapidly expanding economies of China and India, to preserve the Inuit way of life, as well as a sustainable worldwide biosphere.
Key Concepts
- Inuit: indigenous people of the Canadian Arctic
- Inuit Circumpolar Conference: group representing the interests of 150,000 Inuit and Eskimo in international forums
- pack ice: a solid mass of sea ice formed when smaller masses and fragments are forced together under pressure
Bibliography
Johansen, Bruce E. “Arctic Heat Wave.” The Progressive, October 2001, 18-20.
Lynas, Mark. High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis. New York: Picador/St. Martin’s, 2004.
Renwick, Melissa and Baldwin, Clare. "Climate Change Means the Inuit Do What They've Always Done: Adapt." Reuters, 27 Sept. 2022, www.reuters.com/business/environment/climate-change-means-inuit-do-what-theyve-always-done-adapt-2022-09-27/. Accessed 20 Dec. 2024.
Watt-Cloutier, Sheila, and the Inuit Circumpolar Conference. Petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Seeking Relief from Violations Resulting from Global Warming Caused by Acts and Omissions of the United States.Iqualuit, Nunavut: Author, 2005.
Wohlforth, Charles. The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change. New York: North Point Press, 2004.