Climate change challenging subsistence hunters …
Climate change has made life harder in many ways for indigenous peoples of the circumpolar north who depend on fish and wildlife to feed their families. And a new study examines what’s become the biggest difficulty for Alaska’s subsistence hunters: that is, just getting out into the field to get to the food.
“The greatest impact has been on people’s ability to traverse the land and get out into the areas that they hunt and fish,” says Todd Brinkman an assistant professor of wildlife biology with the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Institute of Arctic Biology. “Most of the effects has been negative, and seem to be challenging people’s ability to harvest those resources they rely on.”
Brinkman is the lead author of the study that examines the problem. The study was published in October in the science journal Climatic Change.
“The way the landscape is changing, it’s just harder to traverse those environments,” he said. “There’s safety issues. There' weather events that are occurring. It seems to be a more unpredictable and unstable environment.”
The study is based on accounts subsistence hunters gave to Brinkman and fellow researchers over the past five years. The hunters recount such difficulties as traversing tundra that’s thawing and squishy due to persistently above-normal temperatures well into the fall hunting season or well before breakup.
That’s what Mark Leary, who lives in the upper Kuskokwim village of Napamiut says he ran into last spring.
“The best hunting in my experience for birds has been when they first come, and you could still go by snowmachine,” Leary told KYUK reporter Charles Enoch. “But it’s been so thawed out all over that the birds are more spread out and we can't go by snowmachine.”
Brinkman and fellow researchers recorded the hunters’ accounts in meetings and interviews in four Alaskan communities – two on the coast, two on rivers in the Interior. Brinkman says the study is the first to examine access problems encountered by subsistence hunters in the Interior. He says he’s now working on a follow-on study that’ll be based on accounts by hunters in nine communities along the Yukon River and its drainages.
Next week: Subsistence hunters serving as "citizen scientists" help Brinkman's team by providing detailed observations about climate change-driven changes in their areas that have made hunting, fishing and trapping more difficult.
Editor's note: This story was revised to correct Brinkman's job title – he's an assistant professor of wildlife biology with UAF's Institute of Arctic Biology.
