Monitoring the dynamic vulnerability of an Arctic subsistence food system to climate change: The case of Ulukhaktok, NT.

Vulnerability to climate change is highly dynamic, varying between and within communities over different timescales. This paper draws upon complex adaptive systems thinking to develop an approach for capturing, understanding, and monitoring climate vulnerability in a case study from northern Canada,...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Angus W Naylor, James D Ford, Tristan Pearce, David Fawcett, Dylan Clark, James van Alstine
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2021
Materias:
R
Q
Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/7f3f33dd96d443eeb12c3b15d816c4dc
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
Descripción
Sumario:Vulnerability to climate change is highly dynamic, varying between and within communities over different timescales. This paper draws upon complex adaptive systems thinking to develop an approach for capturing, understanding, and monitoring climate vulnerability in a case study from northern Canada, focusing on Inuit food systems. In the community of Ulukhaktok, Northwest Territories, we followed 10 hunters over a 2-year period, asking them to document their harvesting activities and discuss their lived experience of harvesting under changing environmental and societal conditions. GPS monitoring and participatory mapping sessions were used to document 23,996km of trails (n = 409), with conversational bi-weekly semi-structured interviews and secondary instrumental weather data used to contextualise climate change within a nexus of other socioeconomic, cultural, and political stressors that also affect harvesting. Our results demonstrate that climate change has considerable potential to affect harvesting activities, particularly when its impacts manifest as anomalous/extreme events. However, climate change impacts are not necessarily the most salient issues affecting harvesting on a day-to-day basis. Instead, factors relating to economics (particularly financial capital and the wage-based economy), social networks, and institutions are found to have a greater influence, either as standalone factors with cascading effects or when acting synchronously to augment the impacts of environmental change.