Background Articles

Climate change has been observed for hundreds of years by the plant specialists of three Odawa Tribes in the Upper Great Lakes along Lake Michigan. Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is the focus of two National Park Service (NPS) studies of Odawa Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of plants, ecosystems, and climate change. Data collected during these studies contributed to developing Plant Gathering Agreements between tribes and parks. This analysis derived from 95 ethnographic interviews conducted by University of Arizona (UofA) anthropologists in partnership with tribal appointed representatives. Odawa people recognized in the park 288 plants and five habitats of traditional and contemporary concern. Tribal representatives explained that 115 of these traditional plants and all five habitats are known from multigenerational eyewitness accounts to have been impacted by climate change. The TEK study thus represents what Native people know about the environment. These research findings are neither intended to test their TEK nor the findings of Western science.

Warming soils beneath Utqiagvik are triggering erosion that threatens homes, infrastructure and cultural resources. The North Slope has seen some of the fastest changes in coastal erosion in the nation.

The Arctic hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T., is collapsing into the ocean as it loses up to a meter of coastline each year. The people who live there are in a race against time to preserve their way of life — and their community — before it is washed away.

Anchorage’s backyard wilderness is experiencing a surge in users that shows no signs of letting up. Driven in part by social media and location tracking apps, more people are recreating in historically less-used parts of the park than before.

Protecting the coast of Tuktoyaktuk from the onslaught of climate change is estimated to cost at least $42 million and is only guaranteed to last until 2052. Over the project’s 30-year lifespan, over 60,000 cubic metres of sand are expected to be brought to keep the beach intact.

Approximately 31 Alaska Native communities face imminent climate change due to floods and erosion. This can lead to the disappearance of culture and lifestyle changes. The four tribes are in the process of relocating from a rapidly disappearing village.

A contractor tore down six structures in the past few weeks, part of a process to remove erosion-threatened places that began almost a decade ago.

A researcher's quest to understand a mysterious mass extinction leads to cud-chewing culprits.

Líídlįį Kúę, in Dene Zhatie, means the place where two rivers meet. It has been a place for Dene to gather for millennia. It is also an area prone to flooding, sparking concern about how the community will be impacted by spring break-up, during a year of high water levels.

‘Something has to be done right now ... don’t wait for the time when we’re going to be moved off and be refugees in our own country’

Permafrost in Canada's northwest is thawing much faster than researchers predicted 20 years ago, according to the president of the International Permafrost Association.

11,500 years ago, Norway experienced one of the fastest meltdowns the world has seen. Now scientists fear the same thing is happening elsewhere.

Eugene Asicksik, the mayor at the time, had watched Shaktoolik’s shoreline erode for years. After the September 2013 storm threw tree-sized driftwood dangerously close to the homes, Eugene knew something had to be done to protect the community. He turned to beavers for inspiration, designing Shaktoolik’s first storm surge berm based on the impressive beaver dams upriver.

Melting permafrost, land erosion, and heavy rains are causing these villages to flood and sink

Scientists found out that amid climate change in the summer, drifting ice goes further north, and the coastal area is freed from ice for a longer period.

Many communities in the Northwest Territories are worried about the impacts climate change is having on their cemeteries.

In Alaska, a new oil boom is on the horizon even as climate change arrives and greenhouse gas emissions climb.

In Alaska, a new oil boom is on the horizon even as climate change arrives and greenhouse gas emissions climb.

For as long as anyone remembers, Napakiak has been retreating from the Kuskokwim. The village of about 400 people sits on a bend in the river, and every