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Inuit and Climate Change
Inuit have a well-earned reputation for adaptability and resilience. But one international issue in particular promises to test these abilities to the limit--the effects in the Arctic of global climate change.
Climate change has been much in the news recently. Last November, nations from around the globe met at The Hague in the Netherlands to talk about implementing the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. This international agreement aims to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that most scientists believe cause the globe to warm, changing our climate.
The meeting ended in dismal failure with the U.S.A. and the European Union accusing each other of intransigence. The British blamed the French, and Canada seemed to side with the U.S.A. A few weeks ago the US President declared he would ignore the Kyoto Protocol, provoking another round of international mud-slinging. Canada =s Ministerof the Environment said the American announcement was the result of uncompromising European attitudes; days later the Prime Minister said Canada remained committed to the protocol.
Amidst all this unhelpful wrangling Inuit know that weather and climate in the Arctic are changing. Hunters and elders have, for years, been noting changes to their natural environment. An earlier issue of Silarjualiriniq reported A Voices from the Bay,@ a 1997 book that compiled the traditional knowledge, including climate change of Inuit and Cree in Hudson Bay. In 2000, Inuit from Sachs Harbour worked with the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) to produce a compelling video documenting the impacts of climate change in and around the community. This video was very well received by international negotiators at The Hague.
Earlier this year, in Cambridge Bay the Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., brought together Inuit elders from many Nunavut communities to exchange views on climate change. In late March, a major conference was held in Whitehorse to explore the Arctic dimension to this issue. Three central questions have emerged: How quickly are climate change induced alterations to the natural environment occurring? What do these changes mean for Inuit over the long-term? What can Inuit do about it? This issue of Silarjualiriniq includes the speech of Sheila Watt-Cloutier, President of ICC Canada to the Whitehorse climate change conference. The speech, delivered by Violet Ford, Director of Research for ICC Canada, generated much comment. It outlines how Ottawa may better partner with Inuit and other northern indigenous peoples to address climate change issues, including research, impacts, adaptations, and international responses. The conference endorsed a statement, which is also printed in this issue.
ICC Canada is committed to representing Inuit interests and concerns on this most pressing of issues. We sit on the steering committee of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) being conducted by the eight-nation Arctic Council with the assistance of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC); however, this assessment will not be completed until 2004. More immediately, we are calling upon the federal and territorial governments and northern indigenous peoples to establish a Northern Climate Change Programme modelled on the highly successful Northern Contaminants Programme (NCP). Such a programme would help to answer definitively the three central questions posed above.
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From Consultation to Partnership: Engaging Inuit on Climate Change
Violet Ford, Inuit Circumpolar Conference (Canada)
Introduction
My name is Violet Ford. As an Inuk from Makkovik, Labrador, and director of research for the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC) Canada, I am involved in many international environmental and health issues, including climate change.
Sheila Watt-Cloutier, president of ICC Canada and vice-president of ICC, has asked that I inform you of ICC Canada's commitment to continue to work diligently on the climate change issue both nationally and internationally. Indeed, how northern groups can best work with the federal government on this multi-faceted issue is the subject of my remarks today.
Inuit Circumpolar Conference was formed in 1977 to represent the interests of the 150,000 Inuit of Chukotka in the far east of the Federation of Russia, Alaska, Canada, and Denmark/Greenland. The president of ICC is Aqqaluk Lynge, a well-known Greenlander. Every four years ICC holds a general assembly at which the president and the vice-presidents for each of the four regions are
elected. The next general assembly is in Kuujjuaq, northern Quebec, in August 2002.
ICC addresses many economic, social, cultural, and human rights issues, although it is, perhaps, best known in Canada for its environmental and sustainable development work in the eight-nation Arctic Council and in United Nations bodies, including the Commission for Sustainable Development.
From Consultation to Partnership
Physical scientists at this exposition will tell us their computer models show the territorial North is and will continue to be disproportionately affected by global climate change. Social scientists will tell of significant cultural impacts and the need to adapt. We will also hear from northerners, particularly aboriginal people who observe the land when they hunt, fish, and trap, that climate change is happening and that people in isolated communities are already starting to adjust to it.
Inuit in the eastern Arctic have for some years been reporting changes in the distribution and abundance of key animal species and alterations to the formation and ablation of sea ice that appear to correlate with climate change. If you want to know what Inuit are saying, start with Voices from the Bay , an excellent book published by the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee and the Municipality of Sanikiluaq in 1997 that documents ecological changes in the Hudson Bay bioregion observed by hunters and elders from 26 Inuit and Cree communities. The climate change video produced by the International Institute for Sustainable Developmentwe think of it as "Rosemary's Video"is also very useful, for it shows people who may know little about the North just what climate change means for us.
We have much to contribute to the ongoing debate on climate change and much to learn as well. As such, Inuit and, I think, all northerners in Canada are faced with a central question: how should the North and South, together, address the many facets of climate change? I pose this question to you all, for Inuit refuse to act the part of "helpless victims" in this global play. We don't want to be "consulted" by southern agenciesgovernmental or non-governmental. Instead, we want to partner with those committed to addressing the issue and to helping us do so, over the long term.
What does this mean? The best way for me to answer is to show how Inuit and other northern aboriginal peoples successfully partnered with federal agencies to address transboundary contaminants in the Arctica global issue of great importance to northerners.
In the late 1980s scientists from Laval and McGill universities found elevated levels of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), such as PCBs and DDT, in the blood of Inuit women in northern Quebec and southern Baffin Island. This prompted the federal government to establish the Northern Contaminants Program (NCP) in 1992 to research the problem: Where were the pollutants coming from? How were Inuit ingesting them? What were the health effects? What dietary advice should be provided? What could be done about the issue nationally and internationally?
Renewed in 1998, the NCP continues to be managed by four federal agencies: Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Health Canada, Environment Canada, and Fisheries and Oceans; the three territorial governments; and four aboriginal peoples' organizations: ICC Canada, Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (ITC), the Dene Nation, and the Council for Yukon First Nations (CYFN). Our involvement in the programme is not tokenism. Together we define research needs and priorities, solicit research proposals from scientists in governments and universities, and decide who gets the money. Aboriginal peoples' organizations take on significant responsibility to communicate the results of research to the communities and to help people make informed food choices. We work very closely with the NCP-funded McGill University Centre for Indigenous Peoples' Nutrition and the Environment (CINE), which maintains an all-aboriginal board of directors.
Data generated through the NCP and published in the Canadian Arctic Contaminants Assessment Report (CACAR) featured prominently in the State of the Arctic Environment report endorsed by Arctic Council ministers in 1997. It was clear by the mid-1990s that POPs used and generated in tropical and temperate lands were ending up in the Arctic and bioaccumulating in the food web; the only long-term solution to the problem was to turn off the taps of key POPs worldwidea daunting task. While to many in the South this is an environmental issue, to us it is a matter of health.
Armed with NCP data, federal agencies persuaded first the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (including North America) to negotiate a POPs protocol to its 1979 acid-rain convention and, second, the United Nations Environment Programme to sponsor global negotiations toward a new legally binding convention on POPs. Three years in the making, the global convention is to be signed in Sweden this May.
Both the protocol and the convention address the Arctic and indigenous peoples. This is no accident. ICC Canada, CYFN, ITC, and the Dene Nation worked together and with government agencies in these international negotiations to promote comprehensive, verifiable, and rigorously implemented international agreements. We could do so only because northern aboriginal peoples and government agencies were partners in the NCP.
Through the NCP, we learned about the science of contaminants, and government agencies learned of our diet-related health concerns and the need for effective international action. We all learned that Canada is far more influential in international negotiations when northern aboriginal peoples and federal ministers and civil servants speak from the same script and are seen to be supporting one another. We bring to international negotiations a "high moral ground" that virtually compels nation states that have little knowledge of the North to listen to our concerns.
ICC Canada believes firmly that key lessons from the NCP can be applied to climate change. We recommend that federal and territorial agencies and northern aboriginal peoples' organizations work together to establish and implement an NCP-style programme on climate change in the North. This is the partnership Inuit are seeking. In our post land-claim world, federal and territorial agencies co-operate closely with Inuit organizations. The programme we suggest should reflect this relationship. We put forward this suggestion with some urgency to take advantage of an important opportunity provided by the Arctic Council.
At their October meeting in Barrow, Alaska, Arctic Council ministers established a four-year circumpolar assessment of the impacts of climate change. When this report is completed in 2004, we must use it to inform the world what the Arctic will look like after the ravages of climate change. Canada must participate in and use this assessment process to the fullest. We will do our part. Indeed, ICC Canada is represented on the assessment steering committee. Canada needs an NCP-style climate change programme to develop a comprehensive picture of the effects of climate change in the North and to provide Canadian data and perspectives to the circumpolar assessment.
Many northerners will focus on how best to adapt to the impacts of climate change. This is fair enough, but we also need the three territorial governments and aboriginal peoples' organizations to exert far greater influence on Canada's position and posture in international negotiations. The same might be said of the need to involve northerners in other Arctic countries in developing the positions advocated by their national governments. When we have the climate change equivalents of the Canadian Arctic Contaminants Assessment Report and the Arctic Council's State of the Arctic Environment Report, the North will be equipped to participate actively in the rough and tumble of national and international climate change negotiations. The Barrow Declaration commits all Arctic states to co-operate in international negotiations when Arctic interests are at stake. We must ensure that they do.
We are encouraged by the presence at this exposition of Ralph Goodale, Minister of Natural Resources and a key participant in Canada's strategy on climate change. Mr. Goodale has a well-earned reputation for hard work, unbridled enthusiasm, and, most important in Ottawa, an ability to get things through Cabinet. These are the qualities we need to harness if the North is to partner with the South to deal with climate change.
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Circumpolar Climate Change Summit
Whitehorse Declaration on Northern Climate Change
Whereas we recognize that residents of the Circumpolar North are witnessing disturbing and severe climatic and ecological changes; and,
Whereas we recognize that this interdisciplinary issue requires an unprecedented level of collaboration by all nations and all sectors of their societies; and
Whereas we recognize that Northern residents need to take stronger measures to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions, and we also recognize that, regardless of the success of these measures, the Circumpolar North will remain highly reliant upon global actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions;
Therefore, we the undersigned participants at the Circumpolar Climate Change Summit, held in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada, on March 19th to 21st, 2001, declare that the following actions need to be taken to address climate change and its impacts in the Circumpolar North:
1. We must develop a strong northern message on the effects of climate change and present this message nationally and internationally;
2. We must use traditional knowledge and improve our scientific capacity to understand climate change impacts on northern ecosystems, economies, cultures, traditions and communities;
3. We must develop tools that will enable communities to better understand climate change, reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and adapt to changing climatic and environmental conditions;
4. We must ensure that all new and existing policies, standards, regulations, legislation, and management agreements become consistent with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and our vulnerability to climate change;
5. We must establish effective incentives and remove the many barriers to improved energy efficiency and the widespread use of renewable energy; and,
6. We must ensure that all institutions, businesses, governments, families and individuals take far stronger measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
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