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

In 2025, greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activities turned what should have been a cooler year into one of the hottest ever, fuelling more dangerous and frequent heatwaves, droughts, storms and wildfires, climate scientists said in an annual report.

Planet-heating emissions primarily caused by burning fossil fuels pushed temperatures this year to “extremely high” levels, worsening extreme weather with devastating consequences – especially for the world’s most vulnerable, concluded scientists working with the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group.

Despite the return of La Niña – a climate pattern linked to large-scale cooling of the Pacific Ocean, which can temporarily bring milder global temperatures – the EU monitoring service Copernicus has said 2025 is “virtually certain” to end as the second- or third-warmest year on record.

Nine of our best climate stories from 2025

In its report released on Tuesday, the WWA research group found that climate change made 17 of the 22 extreme weather events it assessed this year more severe or more likely, while its remaining studies were inconclusive, mostly due to a lack of weather data from remote areas.

Ranging from heatwaves in South Sudan and Western Europe to extreme rainfall in Southeast Asia and wildfires in Los Angeles, those disasters killed thousands of people and displaced millions from their homes.

11 extra hot days since Paris Agreement

Theodore Keeping, a researcher at Imperial College London, said the catastrophic wildfires, record-breaking rainfall, unprecedented temperatures and devastating hurricanes seen in the last 12 months provide “undeniable evidence” of a rapidly changing global environment.

“We are living in the climate that scientists warned about a decade ago, when the Paris Agreement was signed,” he added.

Since the landmark accord was adopted in 2015, global average temperatures have risen by about 0.3C, and the world now experiences an average of 11 additional hot days each year, according to WWA’s research.

For the first time, global average temperatures over the last three years are on track to exceed 1.5C, the most ambitious goal governments agreed in Paris, according to the EU’s Copernicus service. The UK’s Met Office expects 2026 to be between 1.34C and 1.58C hotter than preindustrial levels.

“The continuous rise in greenhouse gas emissions has pushed our climate into a new, more extreme state, where even small increases in global temperatures now trigger disproportionately severe impacts,” said Sjoukje Philip, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI). “We are entering a new era of climate extremes, where what was once an anomaly is quickly becoming the norm,” she added.

Silent-killer heatwaves

While heatwaves don’t leave a visible trail of destruction and often go underreported, the research group found they were the deadliest extreme weather event of 2025. One study estimated that climate change more than tripled the number of deaths caused by searing temperatures recorded across Europe this summer.

In South Sudan, extreme heat forced schools to close for two weeks in February 2025 after dozens of children collapsed with heatstroke. Human-made climate change made that heatwave 4C hotter and transformed an exceptionally rare event into a common one, now expected to happen every other year in South Sudan, a WWA assessment found.

Keeping of Imperial said the impacts are disproportionately shouldered by women and girls who predominantly work in sectors with high heat exposure such as agriculture and street-vending.

Flood risks rise as adaptation limits near

Floods were the disasters most studied by the WWA team in 2025, with devastating downpours made worse by climate change hitting Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, the Mississippi River Valley in the US and Botswana.

In the Southern African nation, spells of extreme rainfall are becoming more frequent within a single year, while the rapid expansion of urban centres without adequate infrastructure upgrades makes them more susceptible to severe flooding, according to WWA.

The research group said this underscores the urgency of investing in measures to adapt to a warming world which can prevent many deaths and widespread destruction but remain critically underfunded.

However, the scientists also warned that even strong efforts to prepare for disasters cannot prevent all impacts, as climate change is already pushing millions close to the “limits of adaptation”.

“Jamaica was in a state of preparedness for Hurricane Melissa five days before landfall,” noted Keeping, “but when such an intense storm hits a small island nation in the Caribbean, even high levels of preparedness cannot prevent extreme losses and damages”.

Fossil fuel dependency is “costing lives”

Hurricane Melissa caused an estimated $8.8 billion in physical damage in Jamaica, equal to 41% of the country’s 2024 GDP, with only a small share of the losses expected to be covered by innovative insurance schemes.

In their report, WWA researchers said that drastically reducing fossil fuel emissions remains the key policy to prevent the worst climate impacts.

“Decision-makers must face the reality that their continued reliance on fossil fuels is costing lives, billions in economic losses, and causing irreversible damage to communities worldwide,” said Friederike Otto, WWA’s co-founder.

The post “New era of climate extremes” as global warming fuels devastating impacts in 2025 appeared first on Climate Home News.

“New era of climate extremes” as global warming fuels devastating impacts in 2025

Weather disasters are shared experiences in the Maine foothills and communities are preparing for a wetter, warmer future.

By Sydney Cromwell

The December 2023 flood. The 2022 Halloween storm. The Patriots Day storm of 2007. The Great Ice Storm of 1998.

Nonprofit Center Works with Rural Maine Towns to Prepare for and Protect Against Extreme Weather