Unsettled: How Inuit Are Adapting to Climate Change, Which Is Affecting Coastlines in Canada’s Far North

Joey Angnatok is a master of sensor and spear. His harpoon is an ancient means of measuring the thickness of the seasonal sea ice in Nunatsiavut, the sprawling Inuit territory on the northeastern edge of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.

But Angnatok—an Inuk fishing captain turned citizen scientist in Nain, the northernmost community on the Labrador coast—is equally comfortable with sophisticated modern ice sensors. And it is his ability to interpret and combine the data yielded by these tools that makes him an indispensable part of both the local community and the global effort to monitor the effects of climate change in the Far North, which has been more severely affected than the rest of the world by rising temperatures.

Now contending with the impacts of climate change on their livelihoods, Labrador Inuit are adapting. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, human migration is the greatest single impact of climate change.

For Inuit, the upheaval is more subtle, yet just as unsettling. Over the past two decades, the sea ice in Nunatsiavut has persistently weakened, alongside record-breaking air and ocean temperatures. Add to that two coastal threats: the northwest Atlantic Ocean is a known global hot spot, while in the Arctic Ocean an influx of warmer Atlantic waters called “Atlantification” is speeding up sea ice melt.

Adaptation is not new to Inuit, with their five-millennia-long history of a nomadic lifestyle, and resettlement by church, state, and trade interests this past century. But amid unprecedented climate shifts, which are disproportionately affecting the coastlines in Canada’s Far North, Labrador Inuit communities are taking matters into their own hands.