Indigenous Affairs 1-2/08: Editorial

Recent key regional and global scientific assessments (most notably, the Arctic Council’s Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment, and the national Canadian assessment of climate change) confirm that the Earth’s climate is changing in ways that may have irreversible impacts that will affect ecosystems, societies and economies on scales that require urgent global action. While climate change science still has its critics who seek to undermine its findings and diminish the seriousness of climate effects, there is increasing evidence – from both science and indigenous and local observations – that climate change is already having ecological, social, cultural and economic impacts in high northern latitudes, but also in high altitude mountainous terrain, desert regions, tropical areas, and near sea-level coastlines around the world. The climate of the Arctic, in particular, has shown an unprecedented rate of change over the last fifty years. We no longer see regional changes in climate in isolation, but understand them as interrelated processes affecting geographically distant ecosystems, societies, cultures and economies. The reduction of multi-year ice cover in the Arctic Ocean, as well as glacial retreat from the Greenland inland ice and other major Arctic ice masses, will have immediate regional implications with an eventual global reach. As Clift and Plumb argue in their recent book The Asian Monsoon, the continued melting of Greenland’s vast ice sheet and the cooling of the North Atlantic could result in drought in central Asia, and in rising sea levels and increased risks of severe flooding in coastal south and southeast Asia.