Global warming challenging Canada's northern infrastructure

OTTAWA, November 26, 2009 – Six feet of Tuktoyaktuk's coastline disappears each year. A winter ice road fails to freeze north of Yellowknife and the price of bread skyrockets. A lone communications tower in Inuvik goes down from wildfire or thawing ground and takes the bank machines and the spending money of a remote town with it.

These are the new facts of life that climate change is already forcing those in Canada's far north to consider. A new report says governments, businesses and residents are woefully unprepared to deal with the destruction of roads, buildings, toxic waste dumps and communications systems that are founded on the assumption that it's cold up there and will remain that way in the years ahead.

But the changes from global warming are testing the structural limits of that infrastructure and there isn't enough hard scientific data coming from the federal government to help northerners adapt, according to the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, a government-appointed agency made up of environmentalists, scientific experts and business representatives.

"Melting permafrost is undermining building foundations and threatens roads, pipelines and communications infrastructure. Storm surges, wildfires, floods, blizzards and changing wind and snowstorm patters all pose risks to remote and vulnerable communities," the report says.

Federal budget cuts have hurt Canada's ability to monitor environmental changes in the North and to tailor that information to the design of infrastructure; there is no central agency to gather and share information that comes in from remote locations; and there is no "high-level signal" from the government to northern communities and industries that adapting to a changing climate is a priority worthy of urgent action.

The report says Ottawa should take these potentially costly gaps into account as it moves ahead with a new Northern Strategy that focuses on defending Canadian sovereignty, social and economic development, environmental protection and improved governance.

Northerners are learning lessons about government shortfalls the hard way as they wait to see the effects of this new approach.

At the Diavik diamond mine north of Yellowknife, company officials were forced in 2006 to airlift heavy equipment that was "stranded" at the mine site when the single ice road that the firm relies on for transportation didn't freeze thick enough to support its vehicles. If ice roads regularly can't be crossed, the prices of food and other supplies for remote communities-- already many times more expensive than in the southern parts of Canada — are also going to dramatically rise, the report says.

Tuktoyaktuk, sitting on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, has already relocated a school and an RCMP detachment at great expense after its shore was washed away. The report says the town of 1,000 people has been losing about six feet of shore each year because of warming conditions, and has spent $6-million in the last decade trying to rebuild its shoreline with rocks.

The waste dumps of more than 50 abandoned mines throughout the North, known as tailings ponds, were built on the premise that the permafrost would be around to contain the toxic sludge for many years to come.

"About half of Canada's permafrost zones are moderately or highly sensitive to thawing in warmer climate conditions," the report says.

"Given the extensive exploration underway in all three territories ... the numbers of this infrastructure type are likely to increase markedly over the next few years."

If those dump sites leak into the thawing ground, the possibility of environmental disaster is high. The need for action is urgent given that 12 mining projects are currently under review and there are more than 200 sites being explored by mining firms.

"Canada's North is the frontline in the global climate change challenge. Nowhere else in our country, or on our planet, are the early effects of climate change so plain. Nowhere else in Canada are communities and traditional ways of life so clearly at risk due to climate change," the report says.

"Making the roads we travel, the buildings we work and live in, the pipelines that carry our energy and wealth ... secure in the face of looming climate change is not just a challenge to Canada's North, but an obligation to us all."