Elders, hunters offer evidence of warming Arctic

AARON SPITZER

IQALUIT — There’s less snow in the winter, and the spring thaw comes sooner in the season.

In the summer, the tundra-grass is dry and the caribou seem hungrier and less healthy than before.

Those are some of the observations elders and hunters have shared with GN officials who are conducting a study on climate change in Nunavut.

The testimony — gathered in Baker Lake and Cape Dorset last month — is part of an attempt by the Department of Sustainable Development to use Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit to document changing weather patterns in the Arctic.

A workshop to gather similar traditional knowledge is slated to take place in Arviat later this month. DSD will also participate in Nunavut Tunngavik’s elders’ workshop on climate change in Cambridge Bay March 29-31.

It’s all part of the GN’s effort to come up with Nunavut’s first climate-change strategy.

All the provinces and territories in Canada have been tasked by Ottawa to devise such strategies, which will feed into a national approach to climate change.

Needless to say, Nunavut’s is the only plan that will draw largely on the age-old observations of Inuit.

“We try to target people with years of experience out on the land,” said Earle Baddaloo, the department’s director of environmental protection.

But DSD isn’t prompting elders to provide proof of a warming Arctic, Baddaloo said. Instead, they’re asking questions more subtly, to ensure that answers are frank and unbiased.

Still, evidence of an environment in flux seems already to have arisen.

According to Elizabeth Sherlock, who is spearheading the department’s study, elders and hunters who attended the Baker Lake and Cape Dorset workshops spoke of a shrinking winter season.

They described snow and ice conditions as worse than they were years ago. Vegetation is dried out and the animals that eat it seem to be suffering, the participants said.

Nunavut’s strategy won’t simply catalogue this evidence. It will also provide an action plan, with recommendations about what Nunavummiut can do to tackle climate change — such as, for instance, employing alternative energy and making Arctic power plants more efficient.

The GN claims it’s dead serious about taking on climate change.

In a speech on the floor of the Nunavut assembly last week, Olayuk Akesuk, the minister of Sustainable Development, said climate change is the most significant environmental issue facing Canada’s north.

Many scientists have suggested the delicate Arctic could be harmed more than anywhere else on Earth by a warming world.

Baddaloo said a final version of Nunavut’s climate-change strategy will likely be presented to Minister Akesuk by the end of the summer.