Living with climate change in the Arctic.

• Author: Ford, James
• Position: Inuits

In the late spring of 2000, a group of 52 hunters from Arctic Bay, a small Inuit community on the northern coast of Canada's Baffin Island, were hunting narwhal from the edge of the sea ice. But things didn't go according to plan, recalls Levi Barnabas, a 41-year-old hunter and local politician. A strong wind from the south caught the group by surprise, detaching the ice they were on from the mainland and blowing them out towards the sea. Unable to reach land and approaching open water, Barnabas and several others radioed for help. Luckily, an icebreaker sailing nearby was able to dispatch a helicopter to rescue the stranded hunters. All were saved, but many lost their valuable equipment, including snowmobiles, sleds, guns, rowboats, and VHF radios.

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Stories of Inuit getting into difficulties while hunting are increasingly common. For the Arctic Bay group, the rapid onset of a south wind was unexpected and came without the usual warning signals, such as predictable cloud cover. Unfortunately, such problems may become the norm for Inuit, who depend heavily on the local environment to support small hunting and fishing settlements across Greenland, northern Canada and Alaska, and northeastern Russia.

In 2004, I traveled to two Inuit communities in Canada's Nunavut territory, Arctic Bay and Igloolik (700 and 1,300 residents, respectively) to find out how people are being affected by climate change and to assess what future change may mean for the region. The trip highlighted the magnitude of problems posed by climate change but also demonstrated the adaptability of Inuit. Even so, social, cultural, and economic challenges threaten to undermine this adaptability and, if not addressed, could ultimately compromise their ability to cope with future environmental change.

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On my first trip to Arctic Bay, an elder told me, "The world is different now." Over the past decade, he has witnessed unprecedented changes in the Arctic environment, including later freezing and earlier break-up of the sea ice in the fall and spring, more unpredictable weather, and stronger and more frequent winds. He had also seen greater temperature extremes, increased summer precipitation, and declines in the number and range of mammals, particularly seals. Other residents of Arctic Bay, and of Igloolik to the south, told similar accounts of changing climatic conditions beyond expected natural variability.

These observations are not unique to Canada's Nunavut Territory. In 2004, scientists with the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a comprehensive study of climate change in the Arctic, reported that the region as a whole has undergone the greatest warming on Earth in recent decades, with annual temperatures now averaging 2-3 degrees Celsius higher than in the 1950s. This warming has affected the region's ice and hydrological balance: the late-summer Arctic sea ice has thinned by 40 percent in some parts and shrunk in area by roughly 8 percent over the past 30 years. Precipitation has increased by around 1.2 percent per decade since the 1950s, and rain-on-snow events are far more common.

These changes pose significant risks and hazards to communities across the Arctic. Most of these risks are associated with hunting activities. For the 155,000 Inuit living in the region, hunting is more than just a hobby; it is a way of life that underpins the social, cultural, and economic fabric of community life. People spend a significant amount of time on the land, hunting, camping, and traveling outside their settlements, and must deal with the changing natural environment in their daily lives.

In Arctic Bay and Igloolik, the unpredictability of the weather has caused the most concern. Before venturing out on the land, hunters typically look to the sky to decide if it's safe to go out--assessing cloud...