Arctic people, environment pushed to their limits: report - Nunatsiaq News

NEWS: Around the Arctic May 27, 2013 - 3:06 pm SPECIAL TO NUNATSIAQ NEWS The cover of the Arctic Resilience report, which can also be downloaded. ALEX BOYD KIRUNA, SWEDEN — The Arctic's environment and society are being pushed to their limits, according to a new report released at the Arctic Council ministerial meeting in Kiruna, Sweden earlier this month. Rapid — even sudden—changes in the Arctic likely mean irreversible change to not only the environment, but to communities. The Arctic Resilience report was prepared by the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, with the input of experts from around the Arctic region. While the Arctic Council has a long record in studying the individual environmental impacts of climate change, this report looked at the bigger picture, said Annika Nilsson, one of the major researchers on the report, in a recent release. "Most of the time those [previous reports] have been treating the natural world and the social world fairly separately — what we try to do is look at the interlinkages," she said. The report notes that climate change is affecting people in the Arctic disproportionately, where it will have "profound implications for the wellbeing of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples." Those effects will reach far beyond the Arctic, because what happens in the Arctic has global implications. What's more, the report argues that the overall outcome of climate change in the Arctic remain largely a mystery. While some Arctic communities are at imminent risk of falling into the ocean due to increased coastal erosion, others have benefited from more commercial fishing in newly ice-free coastal waters. And murkier still is the fallout from the increased development that climate change has brought to the Arctic. But what is clear is that climate change is happening — and fast. So communities need to be ready for anything. "We need to understand not just the drivers of change, such as climate change or industrialization, we also need to understand how the capacity for adaptation has been eroded or could be strengthened," Nilsson said. In order to study this, researchers applied what they called a "resilience lens." That means they looked at how the communities and the environment are connected, examined the shocks both could face, and tried to get a handle on how communities are able to adapt, or even transform. There's a whole raft of factors that impact whether or not a community will be able to roll with the environmental punches, the report says. Some are obvious, like having decent infrastructure, human capital and money. But what the researchers term "social capital," or the ability to work collectively and create ties between communities, also helps. As does "cultural capital" — the report states that "the rich cultural diversity found across the Arctic is potentially an important resource for maintaining human well-being and enhancing viability in an unknown future." One of the places dubbed rich in cultural capital is the southwest corner of the Yukon. It was one of the locations used as a case study, because, although it's been home to people for 8,000 years, the people there have weathered profound changes to their way of life. To cover just the last century, herds of caribou — formerly a major source of food — were supplanted by moose, that in turn gave way to wood bison. Europeans moved in, the Alaska highway blazed through and First Nation groups were finally given self-government agreements. Yet, despite all that's been thrown at them, the First Nations people there have adapted. In the case of Yukon, the reports lists two things working against the area: spruce beetle infestation and deforestation, and mineral extraction and development. But helping it to adapt are strong institutions to co-manage those resources and a clear sense of traditional knowledge, which had fostered a "close and respectful relationship with the land." Researchers hope that learning from examples like these could help shape policy decisions in the future. But their work is not yet done. This report is only the midway point in a four-year process. Researchers will continue their research into things like policy recommendations, and will release a final report in 2015 under Canada's chairmanship of the Arctic Council. via Science - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNFjzO9gJONQxjcMf6_KITzFcnweGA&url=http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/stories/article/65674arctic_people_environment_pushed_to_their_limits_report/

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