Warm weather casts a cloud over far North

By Anna McLauchlin

Date: 26/05/05

When he was a boy, Chief Gary Harrison used to be able to touch the glacier in his hometown just outside Anchorage, Alaska.

In the coming years, he had to take a boat out on the lake to get near it. Now, he says, he needs binoculars to see it at all.

Indigenous people of Alaska, Russia and northern Scandinavia are losing their culture and ultimately their livelihoods to climate change.

Harrison, leader of the Arctic Athabaskan Council, is one member of a delegation travelling around Europe to give its personal account of global warming. He explains that the hotter weather is melting the snow on the mountains earlier than it should, drying up the berries vital for feeding local bears and other animals.

Melting glaciers are threatening his people's welfare because they are not able to navigate the waters needed to gather their food. Forced to eat more processed foods that their bodies are unused to, the indigenous people are experiencing higher rates of heart disease and diabetes.

Saami reindeer herders in Scandinavia and Russia are suffering similar hardships, explains Olaf Mathis Eira, vice-president of the Saami Council. Increased rainfall in the winter has led to layers of ice on top of the snow, destroying the Arctic tundra and making it impossible for herds to find food.

The Saami are being forced to move south to the bigger cities, where they are unable to maintain their way of life.

Larisa Abrutina, vice-president of the Russian Association of Indigenous People of the North, says that in 2001 her people lost over 2000 reindeer as a result of this ice. "We're not looking for sympathy, we are looking for action," she says.

The delegation has met EU officials, environmentalists and think-tanks in Brussels, Berlin and Copenhagen.

Article reports on impacts of climate change on the livelihood of people in the world's arctic regions.