By the end of the century, Labrador can expect a 2° rise in temperature on an annual basis; winter temperatures could increase by perhaps as much as 6°.
As a boy growing up in Rigolet, there were all sorts of places Jack Shiwak, a native
Labradorian, could travel to by dog team or, later, skidoo but that, he said, is a thing of
the past.
"The winters have changed and the ice conditions prevent us from going to these places
now," said Shiwak.
Headwaters Notakwanon River, Labrador Photo: Robert D. Otto, courtesy of: Department of Environment and Conservation
"The ice is thin and, in some cases, is not freezing up at all."
Shiwak, who is 54 years old, has observed a shift in Labrador's climate during the last 10 to 15
years. He said winters are warmer, there is less ice and snow coverage, and different species of
animals are showing up where they hadn't before.
"Birds are not as plentiful as they used to be but, then again, we're seeing different kinds of
birds," he said.
"Little songbirds that we never saw before and don't know what they are."
Shiwak worries how a changing climate will affect his descendants and all future generations of
Inuit living in Labrador. He believes that their close ties to the land and sea make the Inuit particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change.
"I think it's going to have a drastic effect," he said.
"I may not see it in my lifetime, or my children may not see it, but the travel we do, the seals and
the animals we hunt I would say if things change, so will the habits of these animals."
Mark Buell, a policy analyst with the National Aboriginal Health Organization, thinks Shiwak's
concerns are legitimate.
Buell has been researching the effects of climate change on Inuit communities for years under a
project called "Unikkaaqatigiit: Putting the Human Face on Climate Change." In the spring of 2002, he and other project members examined the impacts of climate change on Inuit in Labrador by
interviewing representatives from Nain, North West River, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Makkovik, Postville and Rigolet. The workshop was intended to discuss and document peoples observations, knowledge of and concerns about climate changes in their regions.
"It is crucially important to talk to local level people, including elders, about environmental change ... It is important to know how these changes are affecting the people who are living in
the area," said Buell.
"Inuit have lived on this land for thousands of years, and have depended on it for food, shelter,
clothing and all aspects of life. This is an intimate knowledge of the land that scientists can spend a
lifetime studying, but never fully understand. If you want to know what's happening, it just
makes sense to go to the people who know the land the best."
The most frequent observations to emerge from the workshop were that temperatures are warmer
in the wintertime than they have been in the past, weather is becoming increasingly difficult to
predict, there is less snow and ice-coverage, fewer numbers of berries are being found, capelin and
cod have disappeared from shallow waters in Labrador communities and terrestrial animals,
including polar bears and caribou, are changing their distributions.
Buell considers the latter observation to be of particular concern.
"This affects the health of Inuit in a few ways. Often, Inuit have to travel further to access
country foods. This, coupled with changing and often more dangerous ice conditions increases the
risk of injury when out on the land harvesting country foods," he said.
"Having to travel further also results in increased cost to harvesting country foods and
some Inuit are simply not able to go out on the land anymore. The result of this is that many Inuit
are now relying on less healthy store-bought food instead of the nutrient-rich country foods, like fish
and caribou. Such a change in diet is linked to a number of health problems, such as diabetes,
obesity and heart disease."
Also troubling to Buell is a consensus among workshop participants that the weather is
growing increasingly erratic the last decade, they said, brought with it more frequent and
unpredictable storms.
"The result has been that there are more people ending up getting stranded or in trouble when
they are out on the land," said Buell.
"In the workshop that was held in Labrador, Inuit called for a shorter time span before search
and rescue parties are sent out. A reduction from 48 to 24 hours would ensure that more people are
found safe when they are stranded. Inuit also identified the need to have more weather stations
to give more local weather conditions so that people can make better informed decisions about
going out on the land."
Ecoregions of Newfoundland and Labrador. Map courtesy of the Department of Environment and Conservation
According to Dr. John Jacobs, a geography professor at Memorial University, residents of
Labrador are right to expect warmer and more erratic weather in the coming years.
Dr. Jacobs, who studies the effects of climate change on terrestrial animals in central Labrador,
said human interference is causing the climate to change more rapidly than it normally should.
"By all rights, as past records show, we should be gradually cooling off, so over a few thousand
years we'll begin to see the glaciers expanding, but we've turned up the thermostat," he said.
"It's not just warming all at once, it's disrupting the climate system and making strange things
happen over short periods of time.
"If we look at Labrador we see that, on an annual basis, by the end of the century, we're expecting
about a two-degree rise in temperature. Winters perhaps as much as six degrees, on average. But
there will be winters that are cold and winters that are warm, as there always have been fluctuations."
Although Jacobs sees climate change happening at unnatural rates, he cautions against
attributing all unusual weather patterns in Labrador to global warming.
"The effects are not so evident at present yet we don't see many strong effects from Labrador,"
he noted.
"We've always had variability in our climate in this region."
In Jacobs' view, the most severe effects of climate change in Canada are being experienced in
the northwest because the east tends to experience more airflow from the arctic basin, which produces
an overall cooling effect.
"Over the last half of the 20th century we saw a very substantial warming in the west, western
arctic, while Labrador was cooling through the 20th century," he said.
"But beginning around 1993, according to our records, the cooling in the east/northeast shifted to
a warming trend which is nowhere near as dramatic as we see in the west, but nevertheless it
is a warming.
"This winter of 2005-6 has been determined to be according to preliminary analysis by
Environment Canada the warmest winter since records began in Canada, if you average it over
Canada. But most of the warming is in the west."
Jacobs thinks this warming will likely alter Labrador's ecosystem over time by creating a
climatic regime more characteristic of southern latitudes. This will result in more forests and
less tundra.
"We expect with warming that we'll see more of the forest. We'll begin to see the tree line moving
northward less tundra, less habitat for tundra animals, such as the caribou."
While there is no direct connection between the two men's work, Jacobs' predictions support Buell's
findings which report that Inuit are noticing, among other things, warmer temperatures and fewer caribou and both Jacobs and Buell plan to eventually present their findings to the people and organizations that need to understand them the most, including workers managing wildlife, forestry and other parts of the ecosystem, and individuals living in areas that will be affected.
However, Jack Shiwak said the Inuit in his community do not need anyone to tell them about
changes taking place in their region they have been intimately connected with the land and sea for
generations and, as a result, will be among the first to notice and experience any effects of climate change.
"I'll sit down and have a cup of coffee with some people and we'll talk about things like that,"
he said. "Like how different it used to be and how it is now how different it is."
