Naylor, AW orcid.org/0000-0003-0286-6484, Ford, JD orcid.org/0000-0002-2066-3456, Pearce, T et al. (3 more authors) (2021) Monitoring the dynamic vulnerability of an Arctic subsistence food system to climate change: The case of Ulukhaktok, NT. PLOS ONE, 16 (9). e0258048. e0258048-e0258048. ISSN 1932-6203
Abstract
Vulnerability to climate change is highly dynamic, varying between and within communities over different timescales. This paper draws upon complex adaptive systems thinking to develop an approach for capturing, understanding, and monitoring climate vulnerability in a case study from northern Canada, focusing on Inuit food systems. In the community of Ulukhaktok, Northwest Territories, we followed 10 hunters over a 2-year period, asking them to document their harvesting activities and discuss their lived experience of harvesting under changing environmental and societal conditions. GPS monitoring and participatory mapping sessions were used to document 23,996km of trails (n = 409), with conversational bi-weekly semi-structured interviews and secondary instrumental weather data used to contextualise climate change within a nexus of other socioeconomic, cultural, and political stressors that also affect harvesting. Our results demonstrate that climate change has considerable potential to affect harvesting activities, particularly when its impacts manifest as anomalous/extreme events. However, climate change impacts are not necessarily the most salient issues affecting harvesting on a day-to-day basis. Instead, factors relating to economics (particularly financial capital and the wage-based economy), social networks, and institutions are found to have a greater influence, either as standalone factors with cascading effects or when acting synchronously to augment the impacts of environmental change.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2021 Naylor et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Sustainability Research Institute (SRI) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 01 Oct 2021 12:35 |
Last Modified: | 01 Oct 2021 12:35 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Public Library of Science (PLoS) |
Identification Number: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0258048 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:178637 |