Published

5 months ago

December 30, 2025

Alice Rush

On the tundra in Inuit Nunangat, an Elder kneels by thinning sea ice, pointing to the cracks forming earlier each spring. Nearby, community youth work with researchers to set up monitoring equipment that tracks ice thickness, temperature shifts, and permafrost thaw. Together, they are documenting climate change not from separate vantage points, but in conversation, where Inuit knowledge of the land and Western science meet.

Across Canada, such collaborations are on the rise. Indigenous Nations and academic institutions are joining forces to confront climate change, weaving together Indigenous ways of knowing with scientific methods. These partnerships hold immense promise: they deepen understanding, inform adaptation strategies, and strengthen resilience for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. But they also raise urgent questions about ethics, ownership, and how to move beyond colonial legacies that have historically extracted and exploited Indigenous knowledge.

The Promise and Pitfalls of Collaboration

When done respectfully, Indigenous–academic partnerships generate knowledge that neither system could produce alone. Indigenous expertise, rooted in millennia of relationship with land, water, and sky, offers insights into biodiversity, ecosystem health, and patterns of climate change that Western science is only beginning to measure. Meanwhile, academic research provides tools like data modelling, satellite mapping, and policy advocacy that can elevate Indigenous voices in national and global decision-making spaces.

Yet the pitfalls are significant. Indigenous intellectual property (IP), the stories, practices, symbols, and innovations that belong to Indigenous Peoples, has too often been taken without consent, acknowledgment, or benefit. In Canadian history, knowledge of plants, medicines, and land-use practices has been extracted and patented, leaving communities with nothing but loss and mistrust. These harms are not distant memories; they shape the caution and hesitation many Indigenous Nations feel when approached by universities today.

For Indigenous communities, protecting IP is not only about legal safeguards. It is about sovereignty: the right to control how knowledge is shared, by whom, and for whose benefit. Without this, collaboration risks reproducing the very colonial patterns it claims to resist.

Academia’s Growing Commitment to Ethical Partnerships

Thankfully, many Canadian academic institutions are beginning to come to terms with this history and adopt new approaches to research. Universities are developing frameworks and policies that embed principles of respect and accountability, such as:

Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC): Research can only proceed with the voluntary and fully informed agreement of Indigenous Nations.

Respect for Indigenous data sovereignty: Communities must control how data is stored, accessed, and used.

Co-creation of research questions and methods: Projects must be shaped together, not imposed by academics.

Equitable sharing of benefits and authorship: Indigenous collaborators must be credited and compensated fairly.

Long-term accountability: Partnerships should outlast funding cycles and continue to serve community priorities.

This shift is not perfect, nor is it complete. But the trajectory is encouraging: Indigenous governance and ethics are increasingly central to climate research in Canada.

Consequences of Collaboration: Good and Bad

The outcomes of these partnerships are not abstract. They have real consequences for climate action on the ground. Where research has gone wrong, communities recall sacred sites being surveyed without consent, knowledge of medicinal plants being patented for corporate use, and environmental studies that used Indigenous stories but excluded Indigenous voices from authorship. These failures reinforce mistrust and make communities wary of outsiders.

By contrast, when done well, collaboration strengthens both knowledge and resilience. For example:

The Kainai Nation and the University of Calgary collaborate on drought adaptation, combining climate modelling with traditional food system knowledge to develop locally grounded strategies.

The Tłı̨chǫ Government and Carleton University are monitoring permafrost thaw in the Northwest Territories, where Indigenous knowledge guides interpretation while scientific tools quantify the scale of change.

The Anishinabek Nation and Lakehead University collaborate to restore wild rice beds, combining ecological monitoring with stewardship practices that sustain both ecosystems and culture.

These projects illustrate what is possible when Indigenous leadership is respected and academic expertise is aligned with community priorities.

Youth, Future Generations, and the Global Context

Collaboration is not only about research results, but also about building capacity for future generations. Training Indigenous youth in both traditional and scientific methods ensures continuity of stewardship and opens pathways into climate sciences, data analysis, engineering, and policy. This intergenerational transfer is critical, as it is young people who will live most directly with the consequences of climate change.
Canada is not alone in this work. Around the world, Indigenous communities are leading partnerships with academia. Māori researchers in Aotearoa, New Zealand, develop coastal restoration strategies grounded in whakapapa (genealogy), and Sámi leaders in Scandinavia combine herding knowledge with climate models to track changes in snow and migration patterns.

Canada has an opportunity and a responsibility to lead globally by embedding Indigenous governance within research institutions and climate policy.

What Indigenous Communities Should Consider

When invited into research collaborations, Indigenous Nations should feel empowered to set terms, ask questions, and safeguard their knowledge. Key considerations include:

Consent: Has Free, Prior, and Informed Consent been obtained, clearly and respectfully?

Intellectual Property: Who owns the data and knowledge? How will it be used, stored, and protected?

Community Benefit: Does this project address our priorities and bring tangible benefits to our people?

Co-creation: Were we part of shaping the questions and methods, or are we being slotted into a pre-existing framework?

Cultural Protocol: Are researchers prepared to follow our laws, ceremonies, and privacy requirements?

Data Sovereignty: Will data remain under our governance?

Capacity Building: Will this train our youth, employ our people, or build local expertise?

Publication Rights: Do we have control over how findings are published, and will our members be acknowledged as co-authors?

Exit Plan: What happens when the project ends? Will knowledge, data, and benefits remain with us?

These questions are not barriers; they are safeguards to ensure collaboration is ethical, reciprocal, and grounded in Indigenous sovereignty.

Strengthening Indigenous–Academic Partnerships

To move forward, Canada must think beyond project-by-project partnerships and build systemic change built in true collaboration with Indigenous-led initiatives such as:

Embedding Indigenous governance in research ethics boards.

Supporting Indigenous-led research universities and centres of excellence.

Creating funding streams that prioritize Indigenous research sovereignty.

Establishing national policy frameworks to protect Indigenous knowledge.

Formalizing spaces for reciprocal knowledge exchange that place Indigenous and Western knowledge systems on equal footing.

These steps shift collaboration from a transactional to a transformational approach.

A Call to Action

The convergence of Indigenous knowledge and academic research offers immense promise in confronting climate change. Together, these systems can generate insights grounded in centuries of relational stewardship and sharpened by scientific rigour. But true collaboration demands more than goodwill. It requires dismantling colonial patterns, affirming Indigenous intellectual sovereignty, and ensuring that research benefits the lands and peoples from which it arises.

To academia: move beyond consultation and share governance of research with Indigenous Nations.

To governments: fund Indigenous-led research and respect Indigenous sovereignty in climate policy.

To Indigenous Nations: know your power, set the terms, protect your knowledge, and demand reciprocity.

The path forward shines brightest when Indigenous and academic knowledge systems walk side by side. If Canada adopts this model, the future will not only be more just, but also more resilient for the land, the waters, and future generations.

Blog by Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock

Image Credit : Julian Gentile, Unsplash

The post Bridging Knowledge Systems: Indigenous Nations and Academia Collaborate on Climate Research in Canada appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.

Bridging Knowledge Systems: Indigenous Nations and Academia Collaborate on Climate Research in Canada

Climate Change

On the Historic Route From Selma to Montgomery, an AI Cloud Looms

Published

7 hours ago

June 10, 2026

Alice Rush

In this rural Alabama community, some residents can’t flush their toilets. Developers want to build a state-of-the-art data center next door.

By Lee Hedgepeth

HAYNEVILLE, Ala.—When Alabamians marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 to demand voting rights for African Americans, Highway 80 became their path toward freedom.

On the Historic Route From Selma to Montgomery, an AI Cloud Looms

Climate Change

Guest post: How a record-high ‘energy imbalance’ is driving global warming

Published

9 hours ago

June 10, 2026

Alice Rush

The planet is heating up more quickly than ever before.

For decades, greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity have been building up in the atmosphere and trapping ever-higher levels of heat.

The resulting asymmetry between incoming solar energy and energy radiated back out into space – known as “Earth’s energy imbalance” – provides a direct measure of the extent to which humans are disrupting the Earth’s climate system.

This imbalance is growing and in 2025 its 10-year average reached a record high, indicating that global temperatures could increase at even higher rates in the future.

This is among the headline findings of the latest “indicators of global climate change” (IGCC) report, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, which tracks changes in the climate system on an annual basis.

The report, now in its fourth iteration, has been produced by dozens of scientists from around the world.

Its findings are designed to fill the gap between Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) science reports, which are published every 5-7 years.

In this article, we unpack the IGCC report, which explores how human activity is driving a growing energy imbalance and why monitoring systems to track global climate are so crucial.

(For more on previous IGCC reports, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2023, 2024 and 2025.)

Greenhouse gas emissions remain at an all-time high

Global greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to increase, mostly as a result of the use of fossil fuels. However, deforestation, agriculture and industrial processes also play an important role.

Glossary

CO₂ equivalent: Greenhouse gases can be expressed in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent, or CO2e. For a given amount, different greenhouse gases trap different amounts of heat in the atmosphere, a quantity known as… Read More

Over the most recent decade (2015-24), emissions stood at the equivalent of 54.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) per year. In 2024, the most recent year for which we have complete data, emissions reached 56.8GtCO2e.

As the chart below shows, these emissions have pushed up atmospheric levels of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. In 2025, concentrations of these gases reached 425.6 parts per million (ppm), 1936.3 parts per billion (ppb) and 339.4ppb, respectively.

This represents a rise of 3.8%, 3.8% and 2.2%, respectively, since the 2019 levels reported in the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6).

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (yellow), methane (blue) and nitrous oxide (green) over 2000-25. The grey-shaded region represents continuing changes since AR6. Note the different vertical scales for each gas. Credit: Forster et al. (2026)

At the same time, declines in emissions of aerosols such as sulphur dioxide, partly as a result of efforts to tackle air pollution, are increasing the Earth’s energy imbalance. This is because aerosols have a cooling effect on the Earth’s climate, counteracting warming from CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.

(Tackling sulphur dioxide, alongside other particulate emissions, remains critical because the immediate health and environmental damage they cause far outweighs their short-term cooling effect on the climate.)

The Earth’s energy imbalance is rising rapidly

The Earth’s energy imbalance has long been recognised as a key indicator of how the climate is being affected by human activities.

However, it is only in the last few decades that scientists have been able to record temperature changes deep enough in the ocean to accurately quantify it.

Earth’s energy imbalance measures how quickly excess heat is accumulating in every part of the Earth system, primarily in the ocean, but also in land, ice and atmosphere.

Through this accumulation of heat, the energy imbalance influences the rate of sea level rise and ice melt across the world, as well as increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as storms, floods and droughts.

Without human influence, the Earth’s energy imbalance would be close to zero.

But, as greenhouse gas emissions have built up in the atmosphere, the imbalance has been growing since the 1970s. Recent increases to Earth’s energy imbalance have outpaced those projections made by climate models — indicating the planet could see more warming than expected in the future.

As the right-hand chart below shows, the imbalance is now at a record high, having more than doubled over the past two decades.

It has increased by around 40% since 2019, from an average 0.79 watts per square metre (Wm2) over 2006-18, according to IPCC AR6, to 1.12Wm2 over 2013-25.

The left-hand chart shows how heat is accumulating in the ocean (blues), ice (grey), land (orange) and atmosphere (purple).

Left: Observed changes in the Earth heat inventory for the period 1971-2020. Right: Estimates of the Earth energy imbalance for successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most recent decade (right). Shaded regions indicate the very likely range (90-100 % probability), while the stars show the CERES (NASA Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) estimates for comparison. Credit: Forster et al. (2026)

Global temperature rise

The excess heat building up in the climate system from the energy imbalance is pushing up global temperatures at a record rate of 0.27C per decade.

We estimate that human-induced warming – the amount of observed global surface

temperature increase attributable to both the direct and indirect effects of human activities – reached 1.37C in 2025. This has risen from 1.0C in 2017, as reported in IPCC AR6.

While natural variability in the climate system – such as El Niño or La Niña events – can also influence temperatures year-to-year, the upward temperature trend we are seeing is being driven by the persistent imbalance in energy.

We now expect global temperatures to exceed the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels around the year 2030.

This is significant because 1.5C has been identified as the critical dividing line between manageable climate risks and catastrophic, potentially irreversible damage to global ecosystems and human societies.

Heat accumulating throughout the Earth system

While heat is accumulating throughout the Earth system, it is not being distributed evenly around the globe.

Since the 1970s, around 90% of this heat has been taken up by the ocean, affecting marine ecosystems, ocean circulation patterns, sea level rise and climate extremes.

For example, the number of marine heatwave days – periods of unusually high sea surface temperatures – has more than tripled globally since the early 1990s. The year 2025 alone saw 65 days of marine heatwaves – meaning they occurred, on average, more than one day a week.

Meanwhile, the cryosphere – the portion of the Earth made up of frozen water, including glaciers, ice sheets and permafrost – is experiencing widespread ice loss and thawing in response to the growing energy imbalance. This affects ecosystems, sea level rise and infrastructure in polar and high-latitude regions.

Rapid warming has also resulted in record extreme temperatures over land, with average maximum temperatures for any single day over 2016-25 around 1.92C above pre-industrial levels). This is an increase of almost half a degree compared to the previous decade (2006-15).

Sea level rise and the energy imbalance

Sea level rise provides one of the clearest long-term signals of a changing planet.

It is closely linked to Earth’s energy imbalance. As heat accumulates in the ocean, water expands, raising sea levels. Meanwhile, a warming land and atmosphere means addition of water to the oceans through melting of glaciers and ice sheets, also adding to sea level rise.

Over the long-term, sea levels have been rising, on average, at a rate of around 1.8mm per year since 1901, totalling a record 23cm in 2025. This is increasing the risk of coastal flooding, erosion and habitat loss in many low-lying areas around the world.

This rise can be seen in the left-hand chart below, which shows observed global sea level changes from tide gauges (grey and blue dashed lines) and satellites (red dashed lines) since 1901. The solid lines indicate the average across multiple datasets.

Sea level rise is accelerating consistent with the observed increase in Earth’s energy imbalance. Over 2006-25, sea levels have risen at a rate of 3.67mm per year – more than double the rate of 1.69mm per year seen over 1976-95.

This increasing rate is shown in the right-hand figure below, which shows four successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most-recent decade.

(Last year’s transition from El Niño to weak La Niña conditions affected global rainfall patterns and led to a small and temporary fall in global average sea level in 2025. This explains the slight decrease in rate of sea level rise for the most recent decade, which is affected more than the 20-year period 2006-25.)

Left: Global average sea level rise over 1901-2025, relative to a 1995-2014 baseline. Individual timeseries are shown with dashed lines, while the black solid line shows the average (from tide gauges and satellites) used in AR6 and the solid red line shows the 1993-2025 average from satellites. Right: Global mean sea-level rates (in mm per year) for four successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most-recent decade. The shading indicates the very likely range. Credit: Forster et al. (2026)

The bigger picture

Despite greenhouse gas emissions not increasing as rapidly as in the 2000s, this year’s IGCC findings continue to show how far and how fast the climate is changing due to human activity.

A significant increase in decarbonisation efforts in the second half of this decade is required to slow down the rate of human-caused warming and limit the escalation of climate risks and impacts.

These findings, like many others produced by scientists across the globe, rely on international expertise, partnership and the maintenance and availability of global climate datasets and the global observing programmes that underpin them.

This year’s edition of IGCC used more than 40 global datasets produced by research teams around the world, including the NASA satellite record of the Earth’s energy imbalance and the ARGO deep ocean float network.

However, a number of long-term monitoring programmes could be threatened by funding decisions made by governments around the world, most notably the Trump administration in the US.

Local meteorological data and weather balloon measurement programmes in many countries have declined in recent years, especially in Africa, the west Pacific and South America. This reduces scientists’ ability to monitor and understand key indicators of climate change.

This is not just an issue for climate science. Many of these observations are key to weather forecasts and systems that provide early warning for extreme weather. For example, media reports have suggested that recent reductions in weather balloon measurements in Alaska led to a lack of warnings for a recent winter storm.

The continuity and integrity of the climate observations that scientists use to understand how the climate is changing depends on effective and sustained coordination by international organisations, such as the Global Climate Observing System, the World Meteorological Organization and World Climate Research Programme.

Without this data and its coordination, future assessments will be much more difficult at a time when urgent climate action is needed.