Climate Change in the Arctic - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 301

Climate Change Impacts on Arctic Ecosystems
In “Personal Beginnings,” I explained why I have concentrated on the physical, chemical
and toxicological actors in the story of the Arctic Messenger and have said comparatively
little about biological and human aspects. This focus is partly an artefact of my lack of ex-
pertise in these topics, partly because popular treatments usually emphasize wildlife impacts
and partly because I have wanted to emphasize the fundamental drama that the physical,
chemical and toxicological actors are playing, which causes stress on the Arctic ecosystem.
They are ultimately responsible for the biological changes presently under way in the Arc-
tic. These in turn have led to the consequential cultural and socioeconomic impacts to Arctic
indigenous peoples and nonindigenous residents. My neglect of the biological and cultural
issues is a shortcoming I hope others will remedy. However, this delinquency is so serious in
relation to climate change that you will find in subsequent paragraphs a threadbare attempt
to sketch out the breadth of these impacts. I hope others will soon do a much better job. In
the meantime, I can thoroughly recommend the ACIA summary written by Susan Hassol;
the ACIA itself (especially chapters 10 to 17); chapters 10, 11 and 12 of the 2011 SWIPA
Report ; the Arctic Report Cards for 2011 and 2012; W. G. Cramer et al. ( 2014 ) on the detec-
tion and attribution of observed impacts from the IPCC AR5 working group report; and the
2002 compendium of indigenous observations edited by Igor Krupnik and Dyanna Jolly.
This last-mentioned work provides quite an innovative perspective. It describes the res-
ult of a project where Alaskan and Canadian Inuit from the Bering Sea to Baffin Bay and
Davis Strait collected their ownobservations asInuit onchanging environmental conditions.
For as long as indigenous peoples have lived in the Arctic, they have depended for their
survival on a vast corpus of knowledge about their environment. It has been handed down
orally from generation to generation and fine-tuned by personal experience. Krupnik and
Jolly's topic is a very compelling read.
Why is it compelling? First, you will notice the scope and detail of the observations,
which range from the general to the particular. Second, circumpolar indigenous peoples' or-