Arctic people and climate change: opening the dialogue between indigenous knowledge and arctic science

Arctic residents have long known about, and had to cope with, variability in the arctic climate, environment, ice- and weather regime. The intimate knowledge that arctic peoples have acquired about their surroundings is well known; it has been praised repeatedly as a valuable source of information about former and current climate variations in the high-latitude regions. The real applicability of this knowledge to scientific studies of modern climate change, of shifts in ice and atmospheric circulation or of the resilience of arctic ecological systems is another matter. One key theme running through the current discussion is how to develop adequate methods for documenting the knowledge of arctic peoples and how to present it in a form that is accessible both to the environmental sciences and to arctic indigenous communities themselves.

Current scientific understanding of arctic environmental and climate change is based on records that are often short-term, and fragmentary in space and time or both. Weather records and sea ice data are available for many places, but rarely extending back before the twentieth century. Satellite monitoring of snow, ice, and other parameters covers most of the Arctic, but obviously only for recent decades. As scientists move towards broad, multidisciplinary attempts to characterize the arctic system, it becomes increasingly important to understand the nature of the accumulated local knowledge about climate variations and how this knowledge reflects the changes in the physical and biological realms documented via scientific records. Despite all the attention currently being given to the studies of climate variability globally and in the Arctic, indigenous perspectives are all too frequently overlooked and indigenous observations of change are underused.

This poster presentation introduces several research projects that were covered in a recent collection of papers, The Earth Is Faster Now: Indigenous Observations of Arctic Environmental Change (2002, Igor Krupnik and Dyanna Jolly, eds.). The book published by the Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. (ARCUS), in cooperation with the Arctic Studies Center, Smithsonian Institution, addresses indigenous observations of arctic environmental change and the implications of such change for science and the arctic peoples. The Earth Is Faster Now demonstrates that arctic residents have a great deal to say. The nine papers collected in this volume discuss various issues related to the documentation and understanding the nature of changes that are being seen by northern indigenous residents via their specific means of observation, such as shifts in ice and weather patterns, the increase in weather instability, variations in wind and temperature regimes, and various environmental phenomena that can be used as proxy indicators of change. The papers cover more than 20 Native communities across the entire North American Arctic, from Bering Strait to Northern Alaska to the central Canadian Arctic to Labrador and Eastern Arctic.

If indeed the arctic environment is changing, strategies in arctic scholarly research may have to change, too. Climate variability in the North simply cannot be understood and addressed without incorporating the specific and detailed knowledge of the arctic people. The processes by which this can be done, however, take considerable time and effort on the part of both researchers and arctic residents. This new book provides a start in that direction.