August 29, 2008

Rising temperatures damage infrastructure in Arctic communities

Hall Beach, Nunavut

The wind outside Abraham Qamanik’s window is raging at 120 kilometres per hour, so strong that it has flipped small planes at the local airstrip and sent children home from school.

“You picked a good day to call,” says Qamanik, climate change co-ordinator in the Nunavut community of Hall Beach.

Days like this demonstrate why his community is on the front line of the territory’s struggle to adapt to the effects of climate change.

A short walk away, Hall Beach’s gravelly shoreline — no longer protected by sea ice from increasingly extreme weather — is being pounded by wind-whipped waves that now edge within a few metres of homes.

“We’ve got a beach that’s eroding, that’s being eaten away right now,” says Qamanik.

Elsewhere in town, decaying permafrost has opened leaks in the sewage lagoon. Utility poles lean drunkenly askew.

Officials are beginning to wonder if the community may someday have to be relocated. It’s the same story across the territory, says Lewis Gidzinski, who has visited every community in Nunavut to help them assess their needs on behalf of the Nunavut Association of Municipalities.

In Grise Fiord, undependable glacier melt has forced the community to turn to drifting icebergs for drinking water.

Resolute is facing the same threat to its buildings and shorefront as Hall Beach.

In Baker Lake, engineers are struggling to maintain structures built on permafrost that is melting 50 centimetres deeper than it did just a few years ago.

Not-so-perma permafrost is also a problem in Gjoa Haven, now pockmarked by sinkholes that threaten roads and utility pipelines.

Earlier this spring, Pangnirtung was cut in half when runoff from an unprecedented heat wave washed out the town’s bridge and caused wardens to close a section of Auyuittuq National Park.

“It is affecting the way people are living, what they’re used to,” says Gidzinski.

The municipalities, the Canadian Institute of Planners and the federal and territorial governments are all working on a plan for how Arctic communities can adapt to their new climate.

Hall Beach may be the first of Nunavut’s 26 communities to complete a climate change adaptation plan, but the others are working on their own and the territorial government has promised an overall strategy in October.

Canadian Press

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