Monitoring the vulnerability of Inuit subsistence hunting to climate change: a case study of Ulukhaktok, Inuvialuit Settlement Region

This thesis examines the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of a subsistence food system to climate change in the Inuit community of Ulukhaktok, Inuit Nunangat (the Inuit homeland within Arctic Canada). First, a new generalisable approach to understand climate change vulnerability through the lens of complex adaptive systems (CASs) theory is developed. This is followed by a place-based case study applying the approach as part of a two-year, real-time monitoring initiative (the Tooniktoyok project) that examines the susceptibility of subsistence hunting in Ulukhaktok, Northwest Territories (NT) to climate change in the context of multiple social, cultural, economic and political stressors. Finally, a statistical analysis is undertaken utilising one calendar years’ worth of data (2019) from the community to quantitatively identify socioeconomic and biophysical drivers that can affect the productivity of hunting trips taken by Ulukhaktokmiut.

Data were collected through mixed methods, including bi-weekly conversational semi-structured interviews and participatory mapping sessions (n = 76), and the GPS tracking of hunting routes with a cohort of 10 hunters; secondary weather and sea ice data; and a seven-month period of participant observation within the community. Results indicate that biophysical drivers relating to climate change hold the potential to substantively affect the Ulukhaktokmiut subsistence food system. This is particularly true for extreme weather or other events attributable to climate change, such as periods of drastically reduced snow cover or rapid alterations in biological productivity. However, (especially compared to incremental biophysical changes in the environment) socioeconomic, cultural and political factors are often found to hold a greater salience when examining determinants of day-to-day foodshed viability and when attributing statistical association to the productivity of Ulukhaktokmiut on individual hunting trips.

The insights developed from this work advance contemporary thinking at the interface of climate change vulnerability and complex adaptive systems scholarship. In particular, concepts relating to the role of multiple interacting and dynamic stressors within human-environment systems, and the ways through which seemingly simple interactions between stressors can generate complex, ‘emergent’ system-wide behaviours and phenomenon over time. The thesis’ empirical findings also hold relevance for informing the provision of climate change adaptation, Inuit harvester support, and federal food subsidy programmes across the Canadian Arctic. Specifically, they point to the need for a more holistic and transformative approach, whereby initiatives should focus on ameliorating the root causes of why communities are experiencing threats to the stability of their subsistence livelihoods (e.g. systemically engendered poverty, acculturation, marginalisation of Indigenous economies), rather than attempting to work within a policy framework that in some cases can actively maintain them.