climate change impacts on the health and livelihoods of indigenous communities in northern ontario
abstract
climate change is expected to affect people’s health and livelihoods in northern
indigenous communities more adversely than in others due to existing socio-economic
conditions and direct reliance on the environment to support indigenous livelihoods.
the central research questions of this study are: how has climate change affected
indigenous livelihoods and indigenous health in northern ontario communities, and
how might these be affected into the future? these were answered by conducting
research in two parts: a comprehensive literature review, and interviews with 15
members of a first nation community. from the literature and interviews, indigenous
community members made significant observations related to climate change including
increasingly unpredictable and intense weather, declines in ice cover duration and ice
thickness, declines in the abundance of some traditional food species, and negative
health outcomes. several participants had experienced severe enough changes that
their livelihoods had been diminished due to a decreasing ability to participate in certain
traditional activities such as hunting, ice fishing, and trapping and a decline in harvest
success for traditional foods like moose, fish, and blueberries. projections of changes in
environmental conditions and traditional food species abundance throughout this
century demonstrated that in northern ontario, there will be continuing trends of
declines in ice cover duration and ice thickness, increasingly intense weather, more
frequent extreme weather events such as heat waves and forest fires, declines in water
quality due to proliferation of waterborne diseases and the occurrence of cyanobacterial
algal blooms, and declines in the abundance of moose and preferred fish species.