ICC responds to last week’s editorial

Sheila Watt-Cloutier
Chair, Inuit Circumpolar Conference

Climate change poses huge challenges to the Arctic in coming decades (Nunatsiaq News, June 2, “Polar bears and global warming: who’s right?”).

Both the Government of Nunavut and the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, and hunters throughout the circumpolar Arctic, know that climate change will continue to damage the habitat of polar bears. This is why responding to climate change and managing animals and natural resources is one and the same issue.

Throughout my term as Chair of ICC, the premier and his key ministers have been tremendously supportive of the lead I have taken on climate change. Therefore, I would be surprised that the Government of Nunavut would consider the urgency any differently now.

The central issue is how and how best we can help hunters continue to take polar bears and other animals, even as we take action internationally to slow down and adapt to climate change.

We can’t let fear of making tough decisions get in the way of ensuring the long-term sustainability of natural things in the Arctic. This is why we need to continue to use global institutions to promote and amplify the Inuit voice on the sustainable use of natural resources, and to differentiate them from animal rights organizations.

More than 300 scientists from 15 countries and Arctic Indigenous Peoples took four years to prepare the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), endorsed by ministers of the eight Arctic countries in 2004. ICC helped to draft the terms of reference of the assessment so it would reflect Inuit concerns and would become “our” assessment as well as that of scientists.

We knew that history would be rewritten through this assessment, which is why it looks at culture and health, and why it has case-illustrations of hunting, fishing and trapping, something not done by any other international assessment of the impacts of climate change.

The ACIA projected massive melting of sea ice by the middle to end of the century creating a virtually ice-free Arctic Ocean every summer. What will be the impact of this on polar bears? On page 509, the assessment says:

“It is difficult to envisage the survival of polar bears as a species given a zero summer sea-ice scenario. Their only option would be a terrestrial lifestyle similar to that of the brown bears, from which they evolved. In such a case, competition, risk of hybridization with brown bears and grizzly bears, and increased interactions with people would then number among the threats to polar bears.”

Only a few weeks ago news outlets had stories of polar bears and grizzly bears mating — exactly what the assessment predicted! On the same page and still speaking about polar bears, the assessment says:

“The earliest impact of warming had been considered most likely to occur at the southern limits of their distribution such as James and Hudson Bays, and this has been documented.”

Sixty-one Inuit from Alaska and Canada have joined me in a climate change-based human rights petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. We want the United States to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases — 25 per cent of the world’s total — that contribute to climate change.

When we launched the petition I said it was a “gift,” an act of generosity, from hunters who were giving their age-old traditional knowledge and their scientific observations and wisdom to the world.

Our petition is the international “voice of the hunter.” The world would do well to listen to this voice.