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BookmarkScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2005) — March 14, 2005 - Global climate change is being felt most severely in the Arctic and appears certain to cause enormous environmental problems worldwide, a leading northern researcher says.
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And Dr. Mark Nuttall, who holds the University of Alberta's Henry Marshall Tory Chair and served as a lead author on the ground-breaking Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) research project, says the emerging needs of indigenous people urgently need to be addressed.
Speaking to an assembly of researchers on campus last week to attend the 35th Annual International Arctic Workshop, Nuttall said researchers can't rely only on their own observations to catalogue evidence of climate change.
Indigenous people of the North, he said, have "very compelling observations and insights," documenting changes in weather, the behaviour of animals, "and also the very taste of certain animals."
Of course, non-indigenous people living in the North are affected by climate change too, he said, as are those working in resource industries. But environmental changes have a greater impact on indigenous people, many of whom have a strong relationship with the world around them many rely on hunting, fishing, herding and gathering for sustenance.
And as the environment changes, it's important to note that entire cultures are affected.
"They go far beyond economic exploitation of natural resources . . . this is very often the tradition of culture, so the issue of climate change is also an issue of cultural survival."
To underscore the point, Nuttall pointed out that the Inuit word for weather is the same word used to describe intellect and consciousness.
"Change in climate is felt in a very deep, personal way."
How severe are the changes? For the first time ever, Northerners are being sunburned; skin cancer is becoming a concern. West Nile Virus, transmitted by mosquitoes, is expected to make it to the Yukon in the very near future. Thawing of the ground, where it has never occurred before, will disrupt buildings, airports, homes and the accessibility to certain areas via winter ice roads. Increasing exposure to severe storms is causing coastal erosion, and animal habitat and diversity are being affected.
And yet, Nuttall said, the root cause is not always implicated. "In some parts of the North climate change isn't seen as the most pressing problem," he said. In Russia, for example northern indigenous people are more concerned with poaching and pipeline construction and the degradation of feeding grounds.
But in those concerns lies, in some way, climate change. "We have to understand and tease out all these different kinds of influences," he said.
That communication and these findings represent "a great breakthrough" that will further involve northern indigenous peoples in research and help identify local problems which can be connected to specific mechanisms of change, he added.
The ACIA "is a baseline," he said. "We are going to build on this process we are identifying gaps in knowledge."
