Those in Canada’s North are seeing the devastating effects of climate change to the point where half of winter roads will be unviable in 30 years.
The consequences of climate change that bedevil Canada’s North are, like the people who live upon the land, varied from region to region. What unites them is the startling severity of those consequences across the vast and rugged landscape.
Even a cursory glance at the high north shows the breadth and depth of the problems: In the Yukon and Northwest Territories, permafrost thaw is especially acute, with a list of consequences; up in the coastal communities of Nunavut and Nunavik, the instability of sea ice upends most every aspect of daily life; elsewhere, warming tundra is now thick with alder shrubs that make it less suitable for caribou herds, which are a vital food source for many people; and in northern Labrador the changing conditions are reducing the traditional harvest of cloudberries, or bake-apples, which are an important food source and supplementary income for Inuit there.
Everywhere, infrastructure, from roads to buildings, is literally heaving and slumping as the ground moves with extreme temperatures, and threatening transportation, food supplies and the very homes in which people live.
“If we had in Southern Canada the rates of food insecurity and housing insecurity that they have in the North, there would be a lot more outrage,” says Dylan Clark, a senior research associate at the Canadian Climate Institute and an author of the recent report Due North: Facing the Costs of Climate Change for Northern Infrastructure.
“The report really shows it’s a double threat that the North faces, and it’s that infrastructure at its base line across the North has been severely under-resourced for decades and has in many cases failed to service basic needs for northern communities, and on top of that, climate change is affecting infrastructure through permafrost thaw, temperature changes and extreme weather at a much quicker rate in Northern Canada than in Southern Canada, up to twice as fast. It’s creating really significant costs and risks that people are already seeing and that will increase rapidly.”
Already some communities are unable to build the seasonal ice roads that are critical for access and supplies.
“What we show in this report is that half of winter road kilometres will be unviable in the next 30 years,” Clark says. “It shows the need to adapt and figure out new ways to deliver critical food and supplies to communities.”
Larger centres are not immune. In Whitehorse, a landslide caused by the melt of a second consecutive winter with record heavy snowfall closed one of two roads into the city and prompted the erection of fences around vulnerable homes. Meanwhile — on a recent day when one Whitehorse resident incredulously shared “Heat warning …for Whitehorse” on Facebook — wildfires threatened the other road into town. In early July, a spokesperson from Yukon Wildland Fire Management told the CBC that extreme heat and lightning were sparking 20 new fires a day. “We’ve got fires almost everywhere in the territory,” he said.
The situation gets grimly ironic with the news that many communities are simultaneously threatened by heavy flooding.
Some results of all this may seem mere inconvenience, such as a Whitehorse supermarket limiting per-person sales of essential items, but most consequences are grave, and for some communities existential. In many parts of the north, buildings, including houses, are built on piles that are sunk into the ground down to the hard permafrost. What happens when the solid base gets further and further down? How to build new buildings on unstable ground?
A wildfire burns in Yukon. In early July, a spokesperson from Wildland Fire Management told the CBC that extreme heat and lightning were sparking 20 new fires a day.
Many experts say we need to rethink how roads — and runways, such as the one in Inuvik that is being damaged by permafrost slump — are designed, built and maintained. Physical geographer Robert Way says that how structures are designed and built must also change, even though such changes will unavoidably increase the costs of building housing, often in communities where higher costs are prohibitive.
“The more engineering you do, the greater the costs,” says Way, a specialist in how climate change affects glaciers, ice and permafrost at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.
“What we’ve seen over the past couple of decades — but really accelerating in the past decade — has been that permafrost that was once thought to be relatively stable, in a lot of areas there is thaw that has been occurring,” says Way, who is of Inuit descent.
Andrea Ann Carter sees the effects of climate change first-hand in her family home of Gjoa Haven, an Inuit hamlet of approximately 1,500 people on King William Island in Nunavut.
“Even with the elders today, it’s hard today to predict anything,” says Carter, who works with Indigenous youth in Ottawa, and returns to Gjoa Haven when she can. “Climate change is affecting everybody, and everything — the hunting, the teaching.”
Even the storage of food is changing. For perhaps thousands of years her community, which subsists largely on hunting and fishing, with some prohibitively expensive, non-fresh groceries flown in from the South, has stored its meat in a pit dug into the permafrost.
“In our community, we have an underground freezer,” she says. “It was made by our first Inuit people way back when, but because of the permafrost thawing they don’t really use that anymore. A lot of people use their own freezers at home.” Freezers at home, of course, increase demand for electricity and increase the cost of living.
Many communities are rethinking how they generate electricity, such as Old Crow in the Yukon, where the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation recently built a solar-power facility that now provides 24 per cent of the hamlet’s electricity. Other communities look to wind or micro-hydro power generation.
All this change puts pressure on the traditions and culture of Indigenous people of the North, and it even affects — and this may surprise readers — the priceless, irreplaceable archeological evidence of those traditions and cultures, and also the natural history of flora and fauna and the land itself. As glaciers melt and permafrost thaws, more artifacts or valuable sites are exposed at a rate at which archeologists, anthropologists, geographers or others cannot keep up.
“They can’t be everywhere all the time, and there’s so much potential for losing parts of history, particularly of first peoples, when permafrost thaw is exposing potential important, valuable artifacts and nobody is there to see them,” Way says. The problem is worse in coastal areas, where artifacts or whole sites can be washed out to sea due to coastal erosion that is increasing due to there being less sea ice to protect the land from ocean waters.
While so much change is alarmingly visible, what of the unseen effects on the people of the North?
“There’s the physical-structural adaption, and there’s also the human adaptation,” says Ashlee Cunsolo, a climate change and health researcher and founding dean of Memorial University’s School of Arctic and Subarctic Studies in Labrador. “What does it cost to have to adapt when the changes that are happening to you are out of your control? What does it mean when you have to shift your cultural practices or your hunting practices, things that your family has been doing for generation after generation and suddenly you’re not able to do those things?
“The human impacts are enormous,” Cunsolo says. “For the people in the North, the ice is everything — it’s your life, it’s your highway, it’s your culture, it’s your community. Inuit are people of the sea ice. It’s how you hunt, it’s how you trap, it’s how you get supplies.”
As one Inuit resident of Nunatsiavut, Labrador, says in Lament of the Land, a documentary Cunsolo made with people in those five remote communities, “If there’s no sea ice, how can we be people of the sea ice?”
Carter describes the reality for her Inuit family in Gjoa Haven.
“The ice is melting a lot earlier, so it’s harder for hunters to know when to leave and when to come back, because it’s unpredictable these days,” she says. “Before we were able to travel on the land and just go, but today you have to be very cautious when travelling. It’s dangerous, because we’ve never had this before. It does affect the people a lot, in different areas and different ways.”
As weather patterns change so does the behaviour of those animals and fish that are staple foods in the North. “People used to be able to go every year at the same time, depending on what animals and fish are available,” Carter says. “Today it’s very unpredictable when people can go anywhere.”
Take the vast, migrating herds of caribou. Way says, “We actually think climate change is going to have a pretty negative effect on caribou in general,” and that’s critical “given there are so many northern peoples who rely on caribou.”
The animals are effectively following the lead of climate change, and expanding or changing their range.
“Ecosystems are actually moving physically on the landscape,” says Bob Van Dijken, a geographer with decades of work for Environment Canada, the Council of Yukon First Nations, the Arctic Athabaskan Council and others. When ecosystems move, Van Dijken says, there are fundamental issues for protected areas and land claims that are in part defined by the wildlife or climate upon them. What happens when the essential wildlife or conditions move along, while the land underfoot does not?
In her book The Right To Be Cold: One Woman’s Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet, the Inuit writer and activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier says, “The Arctic ice and snow, the frozen terrain that Inuit life has depended on for millennia, is now diminishing in front of our eyes. The land that is such an important part of our spirit, our culture and our physical and economic well-being is becoming an often unpredictable and precarious place for us.”
Many innovative projects are under way to help northern residents adapt, such as the Newfoundland-based SmartICE technical program, which is working with coastal communities on equipment to monitor ice conditions so reliable, real-time information is available to hunters and others who must choose safe routes.
Such projects are important, but, as Cunsolo notes, there’s only so much the North can do. “We need adaption at the global scale to support places like the Arctic,” she says.
“What’s happening in the Arctic is what’s coming for other parts of the country, in different ways. We’re already seeing, across Canada, major flooding disasters, major forest fires, huge storms. We’re seeing heat waves and drought. We’re all impacted by climate change, it’s just unequally distributed right now.”
As Watt-Cloutier puts it in her book, “The Arctic, after all, is the cooling system, the ‘air conditioner,’ if you will, for the entire planet.”
Doing their part
We know personal contributions are a tiny part of the puzzle, but it’s nice to know our members are working on climate change mitigation.
Driven to electric
When he wanted to decrease his dependence on petroleum, Marc Trépanier bought an electric car. He traded in his Honda CRV, which he bought in 2011, for a 2022 KIA Nero EV EXplus. After rebates, he paid $54,000 to get the KIA on the road and he still figures he’s saving between $150 and $200 a month. Now he’s researching a battery-powered snow-blower.
He loves how the car drives and not having to fuel up and change motor oil. He’s never had to use a charging station outside of his home and his lowest mileage from one charge was 275 kilometres (at -25 C.)
“I have no regrets,” says Trépanier, who was director-general for electronic supply chain at Public Works and Government Services Canada. “It’s so much fun to drive. Man, it can move. I’ve never had a gas car that was that fast.”
Podcasting priorities
After he retired from the Canada Council for the Arts Claude Schryer decided to help his children and their generation “have a better world.”
He started the conscient podcast on which he talks to artists who are making environmental statements with their work. He has created 100 episodes and also founded and is chair of SCALE-LeSAUT, a “national hub to develop strategy, align activities and activate the leadership of Canada’s cultural sector in the climate emergency.”
He also travels less and invests in green stocks, but thinks “we need to address systems change in order to address the magnitude of the ecological crisis.” He says it’s an “existential problem” requiring action by retired people like himself.
Halving gas consumption at home
Mike Starr got rid of a gas fireplace and installed a heat pump, thereby using electricity, not gas. They live in Sechelt, B.C., and didn’t think they’d need the cool function on the heat pump, but during B.C.’s heat dome last year, it kept their home 10 C cooler than outside.
They also replaced a gas stove with an induction stove. “We find the induction just as quick as gas,” he says. “Like gas, as soon as you turn it off, it’s off.”