Published

1 year ago

December 24, 2024

Alice Rush

For millennia, Indigenous Peoples across Canada have relied on intimate knowledge of seasonal cycles to guide their hunting, fishing, and gathering practices. This deep connection to the land has sustained communities, shaped cultures, and ensured the sustainable use of resources. However, as climate change alters weather patterns, migration routes, and ecosystem dynamics, many Indigenous communities are facing unprecedented challenges to their traditional ways of life.

The Changing Face of Seasons

Climate change is not just about rising temperatures; it’s about the disruption of long-established patterns that Indigenous Peoples have relied upon for generations.

Unpredictable Weather Patterns

Across the country, Indigenous communities are reporting increasingly erratic weather. Winters are becoming shorter and less predictable, springs are arriving earlier, and extreme weather events are more frequent.

Elder John Keesis from the Moose Cree First Nation in northern Ontario shares, “When I was young, we could predict the seasons. Now, the weather is all mixed up. It affects everything – when the geese come, when the ice forms, when plants are ready to harvest.”

Shifting Migration Patterns

As temperatures change, so do the movements of animals that many Indigenous communities depend on for sustenance and cultural practices.

(Image Credit: Warren Sammut, Unsplash)

In Nunavut, Inuit hunters have noticed changes in caribou migration patterns. Jayko Alooloo, an experienced hunter from Pond Inlet, explains, “The caribou used to come at certain times, following the same routes. Now, their movements are less predictable. We have to travel farther and search longer to find them.”

Impacts on Traditional Practices

These environmental changes are having profound effects on traditional hunting, fishing, and gathering practices across Canada.

Hunting Challenges

In many regions, changing snow and ice conditions are making traditional hunting grounds less accessible and more dangerous.

James Walkus, a Kwakwaka’wakw hunter from Vancouver Island, describes the challenges: “The snow doesn’t come as early or stay as long. This affects when and where we can hunt. The animals are changing their patterns too. It’s becoming harder to teach our youth the old ways.”

Fishing Disruptions

(Image Credit: Fredrik Öhlander, Unsplash)

Warming waters and changing ice patterns are impacting fish populations and traditional fishing practices.

In the Yukon, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in citizens have noticed changes in salmon runs. Elder Angie Joseph-Rear shares, “The salmon are coming at different times, and there are fewer of them. Our traditional fishing spots aren’t as reliable anymore. It’s affecting not just our food supply, but our whole way of life.”

Gathering Uncertainties

(Image Credit: Dmitry Bukhantsov, Unsplash)

Climate change is also affecting the availability and timing of traditional plant harvests.

Brenda Olsson, a Métis Elder from Alberta, notes changes in berry-picking seasons: “The berries are ripening at different times now. Sometimes they come early and are gone before we expect, other times they come late. It’s changing how and when we can harvest them.”

Adaptation Strategies

Despite these challenges, Indigenous communities are demonstrating remarkable resilience and adaptability in the face of climate change.

Flexible Hunting and Fishing Practices

Many communities are adjusting their hunting and fishing schedules to accommodate changing animal patterns.

In Nunavik, northern Quebec, Inuit hunters are using GPS and satellite imagery to track changing ice conditions and animal movements. Adamie Delisle Alaku, Executive Vice-President of Makivik Corporation, explains, “We’re combining our traditional knowledge with new technologies. It helps us adapt to the changing conditions while still practicing our traditional ways.”

Diversifying Food Sources

Some communities are exploring new food sources and reviving forgotten practices to ensure food security.

The Heiltsuk Nation in British Columbia has been working to revitalize traditional clam gardens, an ancient form of mariculture that can help buffer against changing ocean conditions. Hilistis Pauline Waterfall, a Heiltsuk knowledge keeper, shares, “By bringing back these old practices, we’re not just preserving our culture, we’re also creating more resilient food systems.”

Community Food-Sharing Programs

Many Indigenous communities are strengthening or establishing community food-sharing programs to help mitigate the impacts of unpredictable harvests.

In Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, the community freezer program allows successful hunters to share their harvest with Elders and families in need. This practice helps ensure that traditional foods remain accessible even as hunting conditions become more challenging.

Preserving and Adapting Traditional Knowledge

As the environment changes, there’s an urgent need to preserve Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) while also adapting it to new realities.

Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer

Many communities are focusing on programs that bring Elders and youth together to share traditional knowledge and practices.

The Dene Tha’ First Nation in Alberta has established on-the-land programs where Elders teach youth traditional skills while also discussing how to adapt these practices to changing conditions. Chief James Ahnassay emphasizes, “It’s about keeping our knowledge alive, but also teaching our youth how to be adaptable, just as our ancestors were.”

Documenting Traditional Knowledge

Efforts are underway in many communities to document traditional knowledge about seasonal patterns, animal behaviors, and gathering practices.

The Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami has been working on a project to document Inuit knowledge of sea ice across the Canadian Arctic. This information not only preserves crucial cultural knowledge but also provides valuable data for climate scientists studying Arctic change.

Policy Implications

The impacts of climate change on traditional practices highlight the need for policies that support Indigenous adaptive capacity and sovereignty.

Flexible Wildlife Management

There are growing calls for wildlife management policies that are more responsive to changing environmental conditions and Indigenous needs.

In the Northwest Territories, the Inuvialuit have negotiated flexible quota systems for some hunts, allowing for adjustments based on environmental conditions and community needs. This approach recognizes the dynamic nature of both the environment and traditional practices.

Support for Land-Based Activities

Some jurisdictions are developing programs to support Indigenous land-based activities in the face of climate change.

The Government of Nunavut’s Harvester Support Program provides funding for equipment and supplies needed for traditional harvesting activities. This type of support is crucial as changing conditions often require new or modified equipment.

The Broader Implications

The challenges facing Indigenous hunters and gatherers offer important lessons for broader society about the impacts of climate change and the need for adaptive, sustainable practices.

Dr. Gleb Raygorodetsky, an ethnoecologist working with Indigenous communities, notes, “Indigenous peoples’ experiences with changing seasons and wildlife patterns are like an early warning system for the rest of the world. Their adaptive strategies offer valuable insights into building resilience to climate change.”

Resilience in the Face of Change

(Image Credit: Francesco Ungaro, Unsplash)

The story of how climate change is impacting traditional hunting and gathering practices is one of both challenge and resilience. As seasons shift and long-established patterns change, Indigenous communities across Canada are drawing on their deep connection to the land and their capacity for adaptation to navigate these new realities.

These experiences underscore the urgent need for climate action, not just to preserve traditional ways of life, but to maintain the delicate balance of ecosystems upon which we all depend. They also highlight the importance of Indigenous leadership in developing climate adaptation strategies.

As we move forward, supporting Indigenous rights, traditional practices, and adaptive capacities will be crucial not only for the well-being of Indigenous communities but for developing more sustainable relationships with the natural world in the face of a changing climate.

In the words of Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Inuit activist and author, “What is happening in the Arctic is nothing less than a reflection of the health of the planet as a whole. By supporting Indigenous peoples in maintaining their traditional practices, we’re not just preserving cultures – we’re preserving knowledge that could be key to our collective survival.”

The resilience and adaptability demonstrated by Indigenous hunters and gatherers in the face of dramatic seasonal shifts offer both inspiration and practical lessons for us all as we navigate the uncertainties of a changing climate.

Blog by Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock

(Header Image Credit: LaDawn Preuninger, Unsplash)

The post Seasonal Shifts: How Climate Change is Impacting Traditional Hunting and Gathering Practices appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.

Seasonal Shifts: How Climate Change is Impacting Traditional Hunting and Gathering Practices

Climate Change

Wondering How to Talk About Climate Change? Take a Lesson from Bad Bunny

Published

21 hours ago

March 21, 2026

Alice Rush

Discussing climate change can make a difference. Focusing on the impacts in everyday life is a good place to start, experts say.

By David Sun

When Bad Bunny climbed onto broken power lines during his Super Bowl halftime show, millions of viewers saw a spectacle. Climate communicators saw a lesson in how to talk about climate change.

Wondering How to Talk About Climate Change? Take a Lesson from Bad Bunny

Climate Change

Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East

Published

1 day ago

March 20, 2026

Alice Rush

Sydney, Thursday 19 March 2026 — In response to escalating attacks on gas fields in the Middle East, including Israeli strikes on Iran’s giant South Pars gas field and Iranian retaliations on gas fields in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the following lines can be attributed to Solaye Snider, Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:

“The targeting of gas fields across the Middle East is a perilous escalation that reinforces just how vulnerable our fossil-fuelled world really is.

“Oil and gas have long been used as tools of power and coercion by authoritarian regimes. They cause climate chaos and environmental pollution and they drive conflict and war. The energy security of every nation still hooked on gas, including Australia, is under direct threat.

“For countries that are reliant on gas imports, like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South Korea, this crisis is just getting started. It can take months to restart a gas export facility once it is shut down, meaning the shockwaves of these strikes will be felt for a long time to come.

“It is a gross and tragic injustice that while civilians are killed and lose their homes to this escalating violence, and families struggle with a tightening cost-of-living, gas giants like Woodside and Santos have seen their share prices surge on the prospect of windfall war profits.

“We must break this cycle. Transitioning to local renewable energy is the way to protect Australian households from the inherent volatility of fossil fuels like gas.”

-ENDS-

Images available for download via the Greenpeace Media Library

Media contact: Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lkeller@greenpeace.org

Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East

Climate Change

DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case

Published

1 day ago

March 20, 2026

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

Iran war fallout continues

WORK FROM HOME: The International Energy Agency has advised its member countries to take 10 steps in response to the ongoing energy crisis fuelled by the Iran war, including reducing highway speeds and encouraging people to work from home, said the Guardian. It came after retaliatory attacks between Israel and Iran continued to destroy energy infrastructure in the Middle East, causing energy prices to soar further, said Reuters.

SUPPLY DISRUPTED: The IEA also said it is prepared to make more of its member nations’ 1.4bn-barrel oil reserves available to help ease the impacts of what it called the “biggest supply disruption in the history of the oil market”, reported Bloomberg. The outlet noted that Asian countries have been hit hardest by the shortages, caused by a “near-halt” of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

EU SUMMIT: The energy crisis dominated talks at an EU leaders summit on Thursday, said Politico. Arriving at the summit, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez attacked other European leaders for using the energy crisis as an excuse to “gut climate policies”, according to the EU Observer. The Financial Times said that some European leaders have asked the European Commission to overhaul its flagship emissions trading system (ETS) by summer in response to the energy crisis.

COAL BOOST: In response to the conflict, utility companies in Asia are “boosting coal-fired power generation to cut costs and safeguard energy supply”, said Reuters. UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell told Reuters: “If there was ever a moment to accelerate that energy transition, breaking dependencies which have shackled economies, this is the time.”

Around the world

WINDFARM WINDFALL: The Trump administration in the US is considering a nearly $1bn settlement with TotalEnergies to cancel the French energy company’s two planned windfarms off the US east coast and have it instead invest in fossil-gas infrastructure in Texas, according to documents seen by the New York Times.
BUSINESS CLASH: Following “clashes” with the agribusiness sector, Brazil launched its new climate plan, which calls for a 49-58% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2022 levels by 2025 and includes “specific guidelines for different sectors”, reported Folha de Sao Paolo.
SALES SLUMP: Sales of liquified petroleum gas from India’s state-run oil companies have fallen by 17% this month due to cuts in deliveries to commercial and industrial consumers “amid the widespread logistical bottlenecks triggered by the Iran war”, said the Economic Times.
CUBAN ENERGY CRISIS: The US imposed an “effective oil blockade” on Cuba, leaving the country facing its “worst energy crisis in decades”, reported the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Chinese exports of solar panels to the island have “skyrocketed” since 2023, it added.
RECORD HIGHS: An “unprecedented” heatwave in the western and south-western US is “shattering dozens of temperature records” and could lead to drought in California in the coming months, reported the Los Angeles Times.
VULNERABILITY CONCERNS: Landslides that killed more than 100 people in southern Ethiopia have “renewed concerns about Ethiopia’s vulnerability to climate-related disasters”, said the Addis Standard.

1%

The percentage of England’s land surface that could be devoted to renewables by 2050, according to the long-awaited “land-use framework” released by the UK government this week and covered by Carbon Brief.

Latest climate research

Approaching international climate action by shifting the burden of mitigation onto higher-income countries could avoid 13.5 million premature deaths from air pollution in middle- and lower-income countries by 2050 | The Lancet Global Health
Beavers can turn the ecosystems surrounding streams into “persistent” sinks of carbon that can sequester an order of magnitude more than non-beaver-modified ecosystems can store | Communications Earth & Environment
Mobile-phone data from seven diverse countries during the summer heatwaves of 2022-23 showed a “widespread tendency to withdraw into homes” and an increase in out-of-home activities that can offer cooling, such as indoor retail | Environmental Research: Climate

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

Nearly_750_studies_have_found_that_climate_change_has_made_extreme_events_more_severe_or_likely

Carbon Brief this week published a significant update to its map of how climate change is affecting extreme weather events around the world. The map now includes 232 new extreme weather events from studies published in 2024 and 2025. Of these events, 196 were made more severe or more likely to occur by human-driven climate change, 12 were made less severe or less likely to occur and 10 had no discernible human influence. (The remaining 14 studies were inconclusive.)

Spotlight

New Zealand breaks new ground on climate litigation

This week, Carbon Brief speaks to experts about a first-of-its-kind climate lawsuit in New Zealand.

Earlier this week, representatives from two environmentally focused legal advocacy groups challenged the New Zealand government’s climate-action plan in court.

The plaintiffs argued that the measures laid out in the plan are insufficient to achieve the country’s legal obligation to hold global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.

The case could be “influential” in shaping lawsuits and rulings around the world, one legal expert not involved in the case told Carbon Brief.

Reductions vs removals

The new case contends that there are several issues regarding the New Zealand government’s response to climate change.

One of the key arguments the plaintiffs make is that New Zealand’s second emissions reduction plan, which covers the period from 2026-30, is overreliant on the use of tree-planting to achieve its targets.

When the plan was released in December 2024, it was “immediately clear that it was a pretty lacklustre plan”, Eliza Prestidge Oldfield, senior legal researcher at the Environmental Law Initiative, one of the groups behind the legal case, told Carbon Brief.

The plan called for large-scale planting of pine tree plantations, which are not native to New Zealand and have a high risk of burning. Because of this, there are concerns about how permanent any carbon removal provided by these plantations actually can be, experts told Carbon Brief.

Catherine Higham, senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment who was not involved in the case, said:

“The lawyers are arguing that there are real challenges with equating the emissions that you may be able to remove from the atmosphere through afforestation with actual emissions reductions, which are much more certain.”

‘Global dialogue’

While other climate lawsuits elsewhere in the world have also focused on the inadequacy of a government’s plan to meet its stated emissions-reduction targets, this is the first such case that addresses the role of removals head-on.

Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, told Carbon Brief that the lawsuit “builds on a decade of climate litigation” in national, regional and international courts.

Maxwell, who was not involved in the New Zealand case, added that there is a “real global dialogue” between, not just plaintiffs, but national courts as well. She said:

“[National courts] look to common issues that have been decided in other countries. They’re not binding on that court if it’s at the national level, but they are influential.”

Given that many other countries have legal frameworks requiring their governments to create plans outlining the pathway to their long-term climate targets, Prestidge Oldfield told Carbon Brief that other jurisdictions “should be interested in these questions around the level of certainty”.

Higham noted that, even if the case is successful, addressing the plan’s shortfalls will face its own set of challenges. She told Carbon Brief:

“A lot of these decisions are political and they can be politically contentious…Those [measures] have to be put into action through legislation and that is then subject to the usual political process. So that’s where the challenge comes in.”

While she could not speculate on the outcome of the case, Prestidge Oldfield said it was “very heartening” to see that both the judge and the opposing counsel “appreciated how much of a concern climate change is globally”.

She added:

“It’s not a given that the judge would even be interested in climate change.”

Watch, read, listen

COMMON APPROACH: The Heated podcast analysed fossil-fuel advertisements and highlighted the most common deception tactics they employed.

THREAT ASSESSMENT: Mongabay mapped the potential threat that oil extraction poses to Venezuela’s ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and its coral reefs.

SALT LAKES? GREAT!: High Country News interviewed journalist Dr Caroline Tracey about her new book on saline lakes – such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake – the threats that face them and what they can teach us.

Coming up

23 March-2 April: Third meeting of the preparatory commission for the High Seas Treaty, New York
24-27 March: 64th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bangkok
26-29 March: 14th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization, Yaoundé, Cameroon

Pick of the jobs

International Centre of Research for the Environment and Development (CIRAD), IPCC chapter scientist | Salary: €3,200-3,750 per month. Location: Nogent-sur-Marne, France
Avaaz, chief of staff | Salary: Dependent on location. Location: Remote, with preferred time zones
Green Party, social media officer | Salary: £31,592-£32,192. Location: Remote or Westminster, UK

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.

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