Caribou population under threat
Print Edition
INNDIGIGENOUSNOUS hunter Jim Antoine has watched the decline of caribou herds with alarm, convinced that global warming is at least partially responsible for the crisis in Canada’s far north.
An important food source for the Ddene people, an indigenous group living in the northern boreal and Arctic regions of Canada, as well as for other northern communities, the caribou population has crashed in recent years.
Scientists, hunters and government officials say there are several possible causes for the fall in numbers of the woodland caribou but climate change is likely a significant driver.
In parts of the Northwest Territories, average annual temperatures have already
risen more than 3 degrees Celsius in the past two decades, a local politician said, impacting everything from housing, transport to caribou numbers.
This comes amid fears the world may fail to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to meet a target of limiting a global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times — the focus of a major UN conference in Paris in Ddecember where 193 countries will seal a new deal to slow climate change.
“We live with (climate change) everyday,”Antoine said at his suburban home in Fort Simpson, a mostly Ddene community of about 1,200 residents just over 500 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle.
“In the old days, it stayed cold for a longer time and there was more water on the land ... all of that will impact the animals,” said Antoine, who was the premier of the Northwest Territories in the late 1990s.
The caribou crisis is one manifestation of climate change facing residents in a region considered the “canary in the coal mine” by environmentalists, as global warming is felt here first and often with more intensity than other areas.
The Arctic ecosystems, Greenland ice sheet and tropical coral reefs are systems earmarked as particularly vulnerable to rising temperatures.
Scientists fear greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are causing the Arctic to warm twice as fast as the global average, according to a Cambridge University study in September.
Wildlife are particularly affected by the changes.
The number of breeding females in one major caribou herd, a key population indicator, dropped by half between 2015 and 2012, the territorial government said in late September.
In 1986, the herd was about 470,000 strong. Now it’s 16,000.
As warming continues, residents worry the situation will get worse.
The Cambridge study warned of a possible US$43 trillion hit to the economy by the end of the century as rising temperatures melt permafrost and long-buried carbon dioxide and methane seep from the ground, creating a catastrophic feedback loop.
But few believe things will improve following the climate talks in December.
“The countries doing the polluting aren’t going to stop,” said Antoine. “We aren’t the ones causing climate change but we are the ones living with it.”
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