Warming oceans are threatening the Inuit way of life

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In January, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released their annual report on the state of the world's climate. While 2021 didn't top the list of the planet's hottest years on record (it was the fourth-hottest), it was in fact the warmest year for our oceans.

As with most aspects of climate change, the people who are seeing that warming the most are in the Arctic.

"Over the last 25 years, the species that typically thrive here, the numbers are going down," said Hilu Tagoona, a Nunavut resident and a senior Arctic adviser for Oceans North, a charitable organization that supports marine conservation together with Indigenous and coastal communities.

According to a report by the Canadian government entitled Canada's Oceans Now, 2020, all of Canada's oceans are warming by about 1 C per century. However, some parts of the Arctic Ocean have warmed as much as 1 C per decade over the past 20 years.

"When we talk about people who rely on the oceans, it's not just for food," said Peter Chandler, a physical oceanographer with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. "There are a lot of cultures that rely on it for other things than food. It's their culture, it's their way of life."

Tagoona said the traditional Inuit way of life is already being threatened.

"This is culturally significant to us, the food that we have survived on for thousands of years, and the traditions that are associated with that, the ways of knowing and being that we have," she said.

For example, she said that young children go out with their parents when they set out the nets in the ice for char. That first catch is celebrated and then shared with the community, something that is culturally important to the Inuit. 

But studies have shown that, with the warming oceans, char populations are at risk of declining. There's also a fear that other species, like Arctic cod, could decline, which could then extend to the species who survive off them, such as beluga whales and ringed seals.

"If we want to get protein from the ocean … we have to make sure we're not putting any of that in an imbalance," Chandler said. "So if we take one species out of the food web too much, then we're causing an imbalance."

The potential loss of the food and ecosystems that the Inuit have relied on for thousands of years "would be detrimental to us existentially," Tagoona said. "Their sustainability is critical to who we are as people."

It's not just changes to the marine environment that Tagoona is concerned about. She's also worried about the effect a potentially ice-free Arctic — or at least an Arctic with much less ice than has been normal — will have, with more commercial fishing and the presence of more ships that will disrupt the natural oceanscape.