Canadian Arctic Nature Nonprofits

The Canadian Arctic is enormous, mostly uninhabited, and changing faster than almost anywhere on Earth. The Arctic is warming at several times the global average, and the consequences arrive here first: sea ice forming later and breaking earlier, permafrost thawing and slumping and taking the land with it, and species moving north into territory that has never held them.

Polar bears hunt seals from the sea ice, and when the ice goes early they come ashore hungry, and the interval between the ice they need is lengthening. The tundra, which looks barren and is not, bursts into an intense short summer of flower and insect and nesting bird, and caribou herds move across it in numbers that have been falling sharply. Beneath it all, the permafrost holds carbon that has been frozen for tens of thousands of years and is beginning to be released.

The organizations here work with Inuit communities whose knowledge of this ice and this wildlife is the deepest that exists, protect marine areas as shipping opens through waters that were impassable a generation ago, and monitor a thaw with global consequences.