ARCTIC
VOL. 57, NO. 2 (JUNE 2004) P. 204–212
Translating Climate Change Impacts at the Community Level
FRANK DUERDEN1
(Received 12 March 2003; accepted in revised form 19 January 2004)
ABSTRACT. It is well recognized that climate change will have considerable impact on the physical landscapes of northern
Canada. How these impacts will be transmitted to the level of human activity is not clear, but it needs to be understood by
governments and other decision makers to help them identify and implement appropriate approaches to ameliorate the effects of
climate change. Translating physical changes into human impacts is not a simple task; communities are not passive players that
will respond to changes in the physical environment in easily predictable ways. While many prognoses about change are made
on a large scale, human activity is highly localized, and impacts and responses will be conditioned by local geography and a range
of endogenous factors, including demographic trends, economic complexity, and experience with “change” in a broad sense. More
and more studies are yielding important information about community-level experience, both past and current, with environmental
shifts in the North, but research effort by social scientists falls short of what is required to reduce the level of uncertainty, and it
compares unfavourably with the physical sciences’ dedication to the climate change problem. A pan-northern research effort,
building on a long legacy of social science research in the North, would go some way towards translating the promise of change
into probable community impacts.
Key words: climate change, community impact, land use, traditional knowledge, response, uncertainty
RÉSUMÉ. Il est bien connu que le changement climatique va avoir un impact considérable sur le paysage physique du nord du
Canada. La façon dont ces retombées vont se transmettre au niveau de l’activité humaine n’est pas claire, mais les gouvernements
et d’autres décideurs doivent la comprendre afin de pouvoir cerner et mettre sur pied des approches visant à amortir ces retombées.
Traduire des changements physiques en répercussions humaines relève plus que d’une simple tâche; les communautés ne sont pas
des intervenants passifs qui vont réagir au changement de leur milieu physique de façon nettement prévisible. Si bien des
pronostics au sujet du changement sont établis sur une grande échelle, l’activité humaine, elle, est très localisée, et les impacts
et réactions seront conditionnés par la géographie locale et par une gamme de facteurs endogènes, y compris les tendances
démographiques, la complexité économique et l’expérience du «changement» au sens large. De plus en plus d’études fournissent
de l’information importante sur l’expérience – passée comme actuelle – qui se vit au niveau de la communauté en rapport avec
les changements environnementaux dans le Nord. Les travaux de recherche des spécialistes en sciences sociales ne sont toutefois
pas à la hauteur pour diminuer le niveau d’incertitude, et ils se comparent mal à la détermination des sciences physiques de
s’attaquer au problème du changement climatique. Des travaux à l’échelle du Nord, qui s’appuieraient sur une longue tradition
de recherche en sciences sociales dans le Nord, aideraient dans une certaine mesure à traduire la promesse de changements en
retombées probables au niveau des communautés.
Mots clés: changement climatique, retombées au niveau des communautés, utilisation du sol, savoir traditionnel, réponse, incertitude
Traduit pour la revue Arctic par Nésida Loyer.
1 Department of Geography, Ryerson University, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario M5B 2K3, Canada; fduerden@arts.ryerson.ca
© The Arctic Institute of North America
INTRODUCTION
Climate change research in northern Canada serves a
number of purposes. Changes in the circumpolar environment
are of global significance, while elements of the
Arctic landscape provide an excellent natural laboratory
for investigation of past and future trends (Hughen et al.,
1998). Beyond the satisfaction of scientific curiosity, the
local importance of climate change research lies in identifying
impacts on human populations and formulating appropriate
responses (Lewis and Wood, 1995; Cutter, 1996;
Watson et al., 1997; Adger and Kelly, 1999; Handmer et
al., 1999; Kelly and Adger, 2000). While physical evidence
of climate change at high latitudes is now overwhelming
(Comiso, 2003), “uncertainty” best characterizes our current
level of knowledge about its impact on human activity.
The uncertainty is magnified by the considerable
difference between the large scale at which we gather
physical data and generate scenarios and the distinct local
geographies of the widely dispersed communities where
change will be experienced. Research effort focused on
community perceptions of climate change is increasing
(Berkes, 1999; Cruikshank, 2001; Nuttall, 2001; Reidlinger
and Berkes, 2001; Fox, 2002; Krupnik and Jolly, 2002),
but climate change scenarios often depict Northerners and
northern communities as passive actors. Relatively little
attention has been given to the way in which a complex
synergy of factors—such as local conditions, population
attitudes, cultural history, or economic relationships—
will condition their responses to change. Understanding
how climate change may affect the well-being of communities
by damaging infrastructure or economy, as well as
the likely response of a community to such stresses, is
important to governments at all levels. Communities will
need to assess the magnitude of possible changes and
anticipate their local effects, and central governments will
face the difficult problem of allocating limited resources
over a wide range of locations to help mitigate the impact
of climate change.
Identification of the nature of climate change is the
legitimate prerogative of physical scientists, while social
sciences are arguably best equipped to investigate how
physical change will be translated through the filter of
human activity and interaction at the community level.
Nuttall (2001:33) observed that “socio-economic scenarios
are vital for the Indigenous people of the Arctic and yet are
poorly developed and inadequate.” This statement reflects
the reality that physical scientists, though they concede
their prognoses of climate trends are inexact and fuel a
sense of uncertainty, are somewhat ahead of the social
scientists who are investigating the human consequences
of climate change in the Arctic. The present study examines
critically the current role of social scientists in assessing
impacts of climate change on communities in northern
Canada. It makes a case for a broad, systematic approach
to assessing community vulnerability, one that is cognizant
of geographic scale and community history as major
determinants of response. Recognition that climate change
is an emerging fact of life in the North, resulting in drastic
modifications to permafrost regimes, sea ice conditions,
snow cover, vegetation, and wildlife habitats, is well
documented (Cohen, 1997; Maxwell, 1997; Taylor and
Taylor, 1997; IASC, 1999). The most commonly articulated
concerns about impacts relate to the structural integrity
of buildings, modifications of the community economic
base, impacts on traditional food harvests and transportation,
and shifts in industrialization, flooding, forest fires,
and landslides (NCE, 2000). While the volume of literature
addressing impacts has increased markedly over recent
years, there is still a deficiency of relevant practical
material. Of the 106 reports in the Northern Climate
ExChange (NCE) database that dealt with human impacts,
half were more than six years old (and therefore of questionable
currency), and only 19 perhaps had some relevance
to the community scale (Duerden, 2001). Many
reports tend to reflect physical prognoses about northern
climate in that they address change at the large scale. For
example, the frameworks presented by the International
Arctic Science Committee (IASC, 1999) for evaluating
impacts in the Arctic are centered on infrastructure, and
the analysis suggests that significance of impacts should
be evaluated at the regional or even the national scale.
Until recently, studies addressing specific implications
of climate change have also tended to be at a relatively
large scale. The federal government has produced broad
studies of possible changes in the Yukon (Taylor and
Taylor, 1997) and the Arctic (Maxwell, 1997). More focused
studies include the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee’s
review of possible stresses in Hudson Bay
(McDonald et al., 1997) and the Mackenzie Basin Impact
Study (Cohen, 1997), which recognized the complex framework
of integrated regional systems within which impacts
must be evaluated (Lonegran et al., 1993; Huang et al.,
1998). A plethora of sectoral studies have examined impacts
of change on specific aspects of life in the Arctic,
also at the large scale. They identify impacts of warming
as various as increased incidence of “natural hazards,”
communication disruption, and stresses on traditional harvesting
(Aharonian, 1994; Fast and Berkes, 1998), changes
in forest resources (Rothman and Herbert, 1997), expansion
of northern agriculture (Mills, 1994), and increased
oil and natural gas development resulting from cheaper,
more reliable navigation in Arctic waters (McGillivary et
al., 1993). Together these reports have acted importantly
to increase awareness of climate change and its possible
impacts, indicating both the direction in which things are
moving and the clear need to develop responses. However,
they are generally inappropriate for application at the
highly local scale of the 96 diverse communities that
contain northern Canada’s population.
COMMUNITIES AND CLIMATE CHANGE
In climate change scenarios, human activity sits at the
end of a chain that begins with General Circulation Models
(GCMs). Modeling has improved markedly over the years,
but still needs refinement (IPCC, 2001), and uncertainty is
compounded at every step as the geographically broad
climate change scenarios produced by GCMs are translated
into regional and local biophysical impacts, and
finally into impacts on human activity at the community
level (Berkes, 2002). Changing environments will be experienced
differently in each of the communities dispersed
across Canada’s highly diverse northern landscape. It is
obvious that environmental changes in Old Crow at the
edge of the boreal zone in the western Arctic will be
different from those affecting maritime Iqaluit on the
northern Shield in the east, and Arctic Red River’s experience
will be different from that in Baker Lake or Sachs
Harbour. But it is further postulated here that even communities
within the same eco-zone may experience different
effects from identical climate-related events because
of marked local variations in site, situation, culture, and
economy. Recent work suggests that change will first
become manifest in variability, unpredictability, and an
increased incidence of extreme events (Fox, 2000, 2002;
Huntington, 2000; Snow and Carpenter, 2001; Jolly et al.,
2002; Thorpe et al., 2002). For individuals and households,
unpredictability and extreme events will be reflected
in their inability to make decisions with anything
like the same certainty or the same range of probable error
CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS • 205
206 • F. DUERDEN
as in the past. Later, change will be more forcibly experienced
in long-term modifications to landscapes and shifts
in wildlife habitats.
DETERMINANTS OF COMMUNITY RESPONSES
Even if we knew with a high degree of certainty how the
local physical environmental context might change, it
would be wrong to view the community as a “passive
player” whose reaction is predictable. Community response
will largely be determined by existing conditions:
by endogenous factors that vary considerably from location
to location, reflecting variations in culture, economy,
social history, and land-use practices. Two broad approaches
to assessment of probable climate change impacts
can be identified. The inductive approach uses
information and research results generated for other purposes,
such as demographic analysis and economic base
studies, as the basis for informed speculation about possible
climate change impacts. The empirical approach draws
on a population’s observations of environmental shifts and
changes in their way of life. Here traditional knowledge
and the direct experiences of affected populations lie at the
core of the research effort. Traditional knowledge is admirably
suited to local-scale analysis, as it incorporates a
long, experience-based history and describes current and
past geographies and landscapes in considerable detail.
The manner in which it speaks of activities that have a
strong climatic context—including how to navigate, how
to forecast the weather, how to read snow and ice conditions,
and how ecosystems and wildlife behave—makes it
especially relevant.
The demography and economy of the community and
the population’s view of the reality or expectation of
change are the filters that condition the way physical
changes in environment will be experienced at the local
level. Examination of these aspects of community life
illustrate the difficulty of translating expected environmental
changes directly into local impacts and make obvious
the need to develop a systematic understanding of
community-level conditions.
Population Characteristics
Demographic composition of northern communities
varies greatly. Most settlements have hybrid populations
of original peoples and migrants from the south. A lesser
number contain almost exclusively indigenous populations,
and others consist largely of southern migrants. Population
composition tends to be reflected in variation in turnover
rates, which in turn are an important determinant of
attitudes towards change. Populations in the North turn
over very quickly. In the period 1995 – 2000, the Northwest
Territories’ turnover was 37% of its nominally stable
population of ca. 40 000 (Government of Northwest Territories,
2003). For the Yukon, the figure was even higher—
66% of a nominally steady-state population of ca. 30 000
(Government of Yukon, 2002). These figures are crude,
since some communities may have far more multiple
entries and exits of population than others, but they are a
fair indicator of attachment to place. Some places (mining
settlements) display rapid short-term turnover rates, while
largely Native communities tend to have older and more
stable populations, and these contrasts can produce considerable
differences in community memory of past events.
Communities with an economy tied to mining, for example,
tend to have relatively short life spans and highly
transient populations, populations that can be broadly
characterized as perpetually young. Populations flow
through such communities very rapidly: children rarely
become adults, and very few people become old. In such
communities, there is little sense of change or longer-term
cycles of events. Newcomers may view as the norm events
that others perceive to be related to global warming,
because the current world is all they know. Furthermore,
change may not really matter to people of such communities
because transient populations do not have to live with
the long-term consequences.
Conversely, communities that retain strong links to the
land contain older people, mature families, and long memories.
Historically, dependence on the physical environment
of a locale for livelihood made both contemporary and
intergenerational transmission of detailed traditional environmental
knowledge (TEK) central to sustained wellbeing.
TEK is increasingly used to identify environmental
change in the North by corroborating scientific information,
adding new information about environmental changes,
and providing geographical information at the appropriate
scale (Duerden and Kuhn, 1998; Riedlinger and Berkes,
2001). Ideally, perhaps its greatest value lies in keeping
alive the important stories of past places, practices and
events, thus facilitating the intergenerational flow of information
that depicts dynamic and highly localized environmental
histories. The reoccurring message, that the North is
a place of stress and change, is significant as sedentary
living and technological fixes increasingly lessen a population’s
connection to the immediate physical environment.
While differences in population stability provide insights
into different ways of perceiving climate change, a further
factor influencing community adaptation to change is the
pace or amplitude of change in comparison to the human
life span. A change in state over a century or more would
span several generations. Thus, while rapid as a physical
process, it would appear from the human perspective to be
relatively slow and of little significance. In this case, not
only would populations of settlements with high population
turnover rates be barely affected, but even longestablished
populations would perhaps not view the changes
as alarmingly significant. Contemporary evidence suggests
that this perspective is overly optimistic. First, it
appears that the process of change will be characterized by
increased variability of weather and by significant climatic
events (IASC, 1999). Secondly, anecdotal evidence
CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS • 207
from Hudson Bay suggests that the speed of events may
outstrip the people’s ability to adapt: “In the past, when
[the elders] said, “it’s going to be like this tomorrow,” it
was. But our weather and environment are changing, so
our knowledge isn’t true all the time now” (McDonald et
al., 1997:28). Similar observations have been made regarding
Banks Island (Snow and Carpenter, 2001).
Community Economies
At first glance, the economies of northern communities
seem quite simple, a reflection of their small size and
dearth of economic opportunities. The economies of longerestablished
settlements are generally a hybrid of the traditional
land-based sector and a formal wage economy,
while mining communities have a preponderance of industrial
employment and a small service base. This notion of
simplicity is reflected in the tendency to view the employment
impacts of climate change sector by sector, with
various studies postulating impacts on food harvesting,
trapping, mining, tourism, power generation, highway
maintenance, and winter road construction (Lonegran et
al., 1993; Mills, 1994; Fast and Berkes, 1998). The general
prognosis is that some sectors, notably harvesting and
tourism, may be stressed, while others, such as energy and
agriculture, will benefit from warming.
The small size of communities belies the fact that
economic and social structures are highly complex with
(typically) considerable interaction and interdependence
between traditional harvesting, the wage sector, and monies
flowing into a community in the form of various
transfer payments (welfare, pensions, child allowances,
etc). Changes in one sector will have implications for
others, and the matrix of interdependence suggests that a
holistic perspective on these economies is required to
really understand community impacts. For example, “single
sector” analysis of the impact of warming on country
food harvests indicates that species shifts or decline could
lead to a greater reliance on store-bought food (Wein and
Wein, 1995). Effects, it is argued, will vary from region to
region. Changes in vegetation as the tree line advances
will enhance food supply for wildlife species such as deer,
moose, and bear, while decreased runoff may deplete
biologically rich areas in the northern deltas. In the Arctic
Ocean, changes in sea-ice conditions and unpredictable
weather could lead to reduced marine harvests. If this
observation is placed in the holistic context of a community
economy, a more complex picture emerges. Data from
a classic study of the economic base of Sanikiluaq in
Hudson Bay illustrate this point. Quigley and McBride
(1987) mapped out the structure of the community microeconomy
in detail, identifying transactions between the
wage and non-wage sectors, the former consisting of
services and government and the latter of hunting, trapping,
fishing, and the taking of seals. Using imputed
replacement values, the annual per capita value of country
food and the taking of furs was estimated to total some
56% of community income. However, given that most
salaried employment (teaching, government administration)
lay in the hands of non-Natives, the total imputed
value actually constituted 70% of Native household income.
Because of its direct links to the ecosystem, traditional
harvesting is most at risk from climate change, and
if harvests were adversely affected, the only alternative
would be store-bought food, which is expensive in northern
communities. The outcome would be that the portion
of society with the lowest cash income would have to
spend more money on foodstuffs to compensate for the
loss. From the standpoint of physical health, a shift to
increased dependence on store-bought food could be a
mixed blessing. It might mitigate the adverse impacts that
may arise as warming increases contaminants in the country
food chain, but could also give rise to new medical
problems as processed foods increasingly replace traditional
diet.
The scenario described here may be overly negative.
Recent events, such as settlement of comprehensive land
claims across northern Canada and the emergence of
Nunavut, will result in devolution of government jobs and
a broader range of wage employment opportunities. This
may go some way towards offsetting stresses created in
those areas where environmental change would lead to a
decrease in food harvests. Additional employment opportunities
may also arise if sustained demand and changing
ocean conditions make hydrocarbon extraction and transport
cheaper. The extent to which new employment opportunities
would offset losses in the traditional sector would
depend on cultural acceptance of new activities and the
rate at which emerging activities could absorb local labour.
There is evidence that the shift from land-based
economies to the tertiary and industrial sectors has accelerated
in recent years, even without the impetus of climate
change. Usher (2002) cites increases in wage labour as
partially responsible for changes in the location of, and
participation in, food harvests in the western Arctic.
Very little is known about the way in which community
businesses may react to climate change, but it is not
unreasonable to speculate that the life cycle of enterprises
and the past behaviour of northern economies will influence
the significance of climate impacts on entrepreneurial
activity. Much of the North has long been an
environment of uncertainty for the business sector. External
market conditions have historically dictated boombust
cycles and the subsequent growth and collapse of
entrepreneurial activity, with much activity having a short
life span. The physical context in which businesses operate
will assume increased importance as climate changes.
Those enterprises most dependent on local conditions—
such as transport, tourism, agriculture, and processing of
wildlife products—will be most directly affected. Given
the historical instability of the North’s formal economy,
adjustment to climate change might not be excessively
disruptive. Recently established businesses may view the
changing world as the norm; others might cease to exist,
208 • F. DUERDEN
perhaps to be replaced by businesses more attuned to the
emerging environment.
Communities and Change
To the popular imagination, the notion of climate change
in a land that is popularly represented as a cold and
undifferentiated place in which nothing much happens has
a certain cataclysmic appeal. Often lost in the babble about
stress, adaptation, and the need to be prepared for the
unknown is appreciation of the long-term environmental
history and adaptability of northern populations. For much
of the year, Arctic communities lie on the threshold of ice
and water, of freezing and melting, in environments where
minor temperature fluctuations bring about highly significant
changes of state. Changes that may be regarded as
minor elsewhere assume larger importance there because
of their amplification in the narrow ecosystem. Northern
landscapes are subject to violent climate-induced events
annually. As long winters explode into spring, river volumes
increase dramatically; soils become viscous as ice
melts, resulting in floods and landslides. In the summer,
storms bring forest fires to the boreal zone. While these
events are cyclical in nature (and therefore expected), they
nevertheless are the source of considerable environmental
stress. Current research in the Yukon is examining the
incidence of climatically generated hazard events, particularly
adverse winter conditions, flooding, and forest fires,
in the period 1989 – 2000. It has revealed some 264 events,
127 of which were of significant magnitude to require a
formal response in the form of emergency measures or
ameliorative action (K. Gad, pers. comm. 2002). First
Nation narratives speak of cataclysmic changes in local
environments (Cruikshank, 2001), and the longer-term
historical record tells of shifts and swings in wildlife
populations possibly related to climatic perturbations. The
paleoclimatic record paints a picture of considerable variability
through the Holocene, with a maximum variation in
mean temperature of 6°C (Hughen et al., 1998). It is
debatable to what extent exposure to the stresses that
northern communities periodically experience will condition
their responses to climate change. Smit and Pilifosova
(2002) observe that communities can generally deal with
some deviation from average conditions, but changes in
the incidence and nature of extreme events will challenge
their ability to cope.
The North’s Indigenous populations are certainly not
neophytes in dealing with climate-generated stress. To
longer-established Northerners, the message received from
the outside—that climate change is coming and they must
be prepared for it—may seem particularly ironic, especially
when seen in the context of a broadly changing
world. Virtually within generational recall, populations
have become sedentary, traditional land-based activities
have declined, industrialization and consumerism have
been introduced, the ethno-demographic makeup of society
has shifted, and food sources have been tainted by
global contaminants. Fox (2002:45) noted the tendency of
eastern Arctic Inuit, when asked about climate change, to
talk about a wide range of other stressors. “While climate
change is clearly a concern for the Inuit,” she observed, “it
is important to recognize that there are other, often more
pressing problems, facing communities.” Her statement
reflects the reality that, when weighed against the litany of
contemporary problems facing communities, consideration
of climate change implications may be a low priority.
Changing environments and their impact on local
populations are the object of a large and rapidly growing
body of empirical studies, almost all of which draw on
traditional knowledge as source information (e.g.,
McDonald et al., 1997; Williamson, 1997; Huntington,
2000; Kendrick, 2000; Noongwook, 2000). Traditional
knowledge–based studies vary somewhat in methodology,
spatial scale, and subject matter. The range of approaches
and ways in which they can inform the debate about local
impacts is exemplified in Cruikshank’s (2001) narrative of
historic glacial surges in Alaska, the community descriptions
of contemporary environmental changes in Krupnik
and Jolly (2002), and Usher’s (2001) analysis of shifts in
land use in the western Arctic. Cruikshank (2001) analyzes
Tlingit stories, recorded by explorers and ethnographers in
southeast Alaska in the 19th century, that tell of glacial
movements and their impacts on local populations. Her
main objective is to explore the link between landscape
and culture. The stories picture a northern environment
that is not static or immutable, but capable of very rapid
change, and a message of uncertainty and unpredictability
emerges from the narratives. Although the work is about
climate change, it is narrators from another era that are
speaking, rather than contemporary populations that perhaps
have some informed expectation about climate trends.
The result is a highly objective analysis, from which a
forceful message about the vagaries of a northern environment
emerges almost tangentially. The relevance of the
stories to contemporary discussion of climate change is
that they underline the fact that confronting changes (often
cataclysmic) in northern environments is nothing new,
perhaps demonstrating the role of traditional knowledge in
equipping the listener to appreciate environments that are
subject to change—environments that can surprise.
The use of traditional knowledge to identify contemporary
environmental shifts possibly associated with climate
change is well exemplified in the papers contained in
Krupnik and Jolly’s edited work (2002). These papers are
grounded in contemporary experience at the community
scale, the scale at which change is experienced, in environments
where seemingly minor shifts in weather systems
have important ramifications for food gathering, access to
the land, and overall community well-being. Participatory
Action Research, in which host communities facilitate
research and play an important role in framing research
questions, is used to approach the question of change in
some 28 Arctic communities in Canada and Alaska. Together,
the works are a compendium of environmental
CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS • 209
stresses, demonstrating the link between climate and land
use and the role of TEK in forecasting weather, as well as
providing baseline information on the ways in which land
use may be affected by climate change. Increasing inability
to forecast the weather with the same certainty as in the
past (Jolly et al., 2002), ecosystem changes (Thorpe et al.,
2002), and recent changes in sea-ice patterns (Krupnik,
2002) strongly indicate that the climate is perhaps changing
and demonstrate corroboration between TEK and physical
sciences. Overall, the papers constitute a laudably
ambitious attempt to reconcile traditional knowledge with
conventional science, recognizing both its contemporary
relevance and its mutability, reflected in semantic convergence
between the language of northern Natives and scientists:
“Hunters of today speak increasingly in terms of
ecosystems, animal ‘behaviour,’ contamination, and ‘stock
health’” (Krupnik, 2002:183). However, there is still some
dissonance between what TEK is telling us about trends in
northern ecosystems and what science tells us. The paper
by Kofinas and the First Nations constituting the Arctic
Borderlands Co-op provides numerous examples of events
symptomatic of environmental change in the northern
Yukon, but points out significant discrepancies between
the local population’s assessment of trends and the information
provided by scientists. These include different
estimates of caribou population sizes, the level of contaminants
in caribou livers, and the size of the salmon run on
the Porcupine River. Differences between the way local
land-users encounter wildlife and the way scientists measure
it are cited as plausible reasons for the discrepancies
(Kofinas et al., 2002).
Taken together, the works in Krupnik and Jolly (2002)
paint an eclectic picture of landscapes in transition and
land-use practices that are increasingly stressed. Events
that are of significance to diverse and highly localized
populations are central themes, and these vary from location
to location, largely as a reflection of differences in
resource use and the ways in which landscapes are interpreted.
However, while the contribution that the studies
make to the climate change debate is highly significant,
Participatory Action Research was the only common methodological
element across the widely dispersed communities
studied, and an opportunity to conduct a rigorous
longitudinal analysis that could have yielded useful information
on system-wide trends was perhaps missed.
Usher (2001) uses time-series land-use maps depicting
harvesting to identify shifts in the location and nature of
harvesting in the Inuvialuit settlement region of the western
Arctic. He employs a traditional but rigorous social
science approach, using structured surveys to elicit information
on the geography of harvest activity, with high
response rates. The work is not focused on climate change,
and the question of change does not enter into data collection.
But (as in Cruikshank, 2001) the question of change
enters almost obliquely, and he is thus able to discuss
possible climate change implications with considerable
objectivity. By contrasting maps made at different times,
Usher is able to identify shifts in the location of harvesting,
noting a movement away from marine-based locations and
activities towards terrestrial locations. An initial interpretation
of such shifts would be that they were primarily due
to changes in sea-ice conditions associated with climate
change. However, though sea-ice changes appear to be
partly responsible, Usher is (rightly) circumspect in seeking
explanations for the hunting trend, postulating that
uncertainty about weather conditions is only one of a
synergistic mix of factors responsible for changes in hunting
behaviour. The demise of dog teams is cited as a major
factor in shifts in harvesting, and increasing involvement
in the wage economy may mean that hunters have less time
to spend on the land and thus base their activities closer to
home. Changes in local ice conditions do lead harvesters
to seek more predictable terrestrial locations, but part of
the shift may reflect the relative security that modern
communities offer. Improved food security and the intrusion
of competing media reduce the incentive (and perhaps
the opportunity) to develop a rigorous understanding of
regional geography. If traditional geographical knowledge
is not being transmitted with the same rigour as it was
in the past, then many modern harvesters are as not as well
equipped as their ancestors to cope with the vagaries of the
marine environment. It follows from this that even if the
physical environment were not changing, there would
probably be a shift in land-use activity.
DISCUSSION
It is apparent that making objective assessments of
climate change impacts at the community level is fraught
with difficulty. Even where changes in behaviour clearly
coincide with changes in the physical environment, caution
is required in attributing causality. Changes may
emanate from societal rather than physical events. Some
circumspection is also perhaps in order in assessing the
results of community-based research that seeks evidence
of climate change. Given that the prognosis of climate
change is widely known, do research questions that ask
respondents about environmental conditions or evidence
of climate change impacts not raise community expectations
(or worse, give rise to misplaced apprehension),
eliciting positive responses that in reality may be spurious
or just plain wrong?
Personal experience takes place in a limited time frame,
making it difficult to separate long-term change from
aberration. There is also a possible conflict in perspectives.
Predictability and preoccupation with the “long
term” and “progress” are attributes of modernism that may
make it difficult for Southerners to accept the world as an
uncertain place. Until relatively recently, the time horizons
of northern Natives were considerably different from
those of contemporary populations, and adjustment to
change and uncertainty was a constant feature of life.
Although TEK provides detailed descriptions of local
210 • F. DUERDEN
geographies and perceived environmental change and plays
an important role in corroborating or critically evaluating
the prognoses of physical scientists, the quest for evidence
of contemporary climate change is perhaps not primarily a
social science question.
What we need to know, and what lies fairly in the
purview of social scientists, is how human activity will
respond to change. From the standpoint of affected
populations, the important questions are “What will the
impact be on way of life?” and “How shall we adapt?”
Unfortunately, unlike their counterparts in the physical
sciences, research efforts in the social sciences are somewhat
dilute. They are neither systematic nor systemic, and
they fall short of either providing local populations with a
sense of what to expect, or providing decision makers with
assessments of probable impacts as a basis for prioritizing
responses and allocating resources. To this point, little
more has been accomplished than demonstrating that environments
in the North are perceived to be changing. It is
difficult to establish the ultimate significance of described
stresses because there is a paucity of well-organized data
on initial conditions in communities, such as locational
context, demography, community history, or economic
complexity, that would give insights into the way in which
change may be received and transmitted. The need to
understand more about community conditions has emerged
at a time when social scientists have been obliged to
reassess the manner in which they conduct research in the
North, in the face of concerns about the intrusive nature of
research methodologies, poor communication with affected
populations, and conflicts over the ownership of
research results. Sensitivity to these concerns is reflected
in the search for new social science paradigms in community
change research, but given the apparent rapidity at
which northern environments are perceived to be changing,
do we really have the luxury of using the climate
change question as a vehicle for experimenting with new
techniques? At the current pace of research, change may
outstrip the ability to make reasoned assessments of its
nature or its impacts.
Systematic investigation of current conditions in communities
across the North is needed with some expediency,
both as a basis for comparative assessment of
vulnerability to climate change and to inform decisions
about the allocation of resources in support of mitigative
measures. This would entail community-by-community
analysis of current conditions and a review of those dynamic
components of community life that would condition
attitudes towards change. Timeliness, clear and rigorous
methodologies that allow for longitudinal analysis of data,
minimal community intrusion, and findings that are easily
communicated to affected populations so that they can
respond to them should be features of such an endeavour.
Over the past 60 years, there has been a sustained tradition
of northern settlement studies, reflecting both prevailing
academic wisdom and pragmatic concerns. Economic base,
quality of life, and sustainable development have variously
been the focus of studies, with vulnerability and resilience
as recurring themes, and this tradition assumes renewed
importance in assessing community impacts of climate
change. A detailed systematic scan of the physical context,
natural hazard history, demography, economy, and transactional
structure of each northern community would serve
as a basis for identifying predisposition to impact under
different climate change scenarios. Given the volume of
research over the past 20 years, a useful and systematic
picture of community vulnerability to climate change
could be built with relatively little intrusion. There are
extensive secondary resources that can already yield much
(if not all) of the data required on the current disposition of
communities. Some sources are obvious: remote-sensed
imagery; various socio-economic assessments related to
mega-project proposals; extensive data generated on land
use and occupancy as a basis for land-claim negotiations
(which have covered all of Arctic Canada over the past 20
years); and data generated in support of the Northern
Contaminants Program, which could provide important
information about current dependency on the land. Additionally,
a large number of research reports exist on various
aspects of life in northern communities, and
considerable demographic information lies in the public
record. Information on community experience of and vulnerability
to hazards rests in government departments, and
in some areas, a considerable record can be found in the
pages of long-established community newspapers. This
approach would minimize community intrusion and be
relatively cost-effective, because no extensive fieldwork
or generation of primary community data would be required.
CONCLUSIONS
Although physical environments at high latitudes will
be more greatly affected by climate change than those
found elsewhere in North America, it is not appropriate to
extrapolate this effect uncritically into prognoses of necessarily
dire human impacts. Populations are not passive
players. Their responses will be conditioned by the long
history of uncertain environments and the local context in
which they live. Systematic research focusing on human
activity at the local scale is important in moving toward an
objective assessment of probable impacts of climate change,
reducing uncertainty and providing decision makers with
structured information that can delimit likely scenarios
and form a rational basis for allocating resources.
In the course of this paper, it has been suggested that
two lines of research lead towards an informed sense of
probable human impacts: the analysis of what is already
known about the character of northern communities and
the use of the current perspectives and observations of
resident populations. Social science research has an important
role in the climate change debate, underscoring the
strong link between the well-being of northern communities
CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS • 211
and their immediate environments, demonstrating the role
of TEK and narrative in addressing uncertainty, and revealing
the complexity of community economies that
makes translation of climate change into community-level
impacts a difficult task. Practically, at the community
level, it can assist communities that are already experiencing
change to translate those changes into probable longerterm
impacts on their way of life.
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