By Frey Blake-Pijogge, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Independent
September 20, 2025
Ron Webb says he and other community members don’t have a choice when it comes to dealing with Labrador’s rapidly changing climate, but they must adapt.
“Years ago, we would get ice of the normal five to seven feet of ice – and now we’re lucky to have three feet and maybe two feet,” the Inuk elder from Nunatsiavut says, explaining that while much of the sea ice still freezes to a safe thickness in winter, there are areas around his community of Nain where the ice is soft and poses a significant risk to Inuit.
Nain is the northernmost Inuit community in Nunatsiavut, the semi-autonomous region and government as defined in the Labrador Inuit Land Claim Agreement of 2005. It also includes the four Inuit coastal communities of Hopedale, Makkovik, Postville, and Rigolet.
In the two decades since the formation of the Nunatsiavut Government and the designation of Labrador Inuit Lands, the region has seen a dramatic increase in winter temperatures, characterized by warmer and rainier seasons.
The impacts of climate change can be seen in the spring breakup, says Webb. “There are holes opening in early spring where they never used to open before at that time, and we seem to get more tide these days in different places.”
Webb says the tides that break up the sea ice now open earlier, often seemingly overnight, creating hazards for people who go hunting, fishing, and driving on the ice. “I don’t know if there’s any one thing that can be done that would help in any big way,” he says, “so we’re just adapting to it.”
As a member of Nain’s Ground Search and Rescue, Webb says the ice’s unpredictability forces the team to issue alerts to the community. “We all work together by word of mouth, you know. Here you just talk to certain people that go to certain areas and gather the information,” he says, explaining thin ice also poses a risk to search and rescue members. “If someone is on the thin ice and they fell through – sometimes we can’t respond to it for the safety of our members, but we do the best we can.”
Webb says his concerns go beyond the physical safety of those travelling on the ice; he’s also worried about how the changing conditions are impacting traditional ways of life, which is in turn impacting his and others’ mental health. “I didn’t really think about it a whole lot,” he says. “But now that we’re stuck, I call it landlocked in town. It affects us, and I guess we just got to try and change with it.”
Webb says not being able to travel on snowmobile to go hunting, ice fishing, or to the cabin creates a deeper feeling of isolation in an already-isolated community.
Impacts on culture, travel, and animals
Rex Holwell is an Inuk elder from Nain and the manager of Nunatsiavut operations for SmartICE, a non-profit organization that trains residents of northern communities to measure sea ice as a matter of public safety. The organization operates in all five Nunatsiavut communities.
Holwell has conversations with experienced hunters about the sea ice conditions and changes they’ve seen in their lifetimes. “When they go out (on the ice), some of their traditional learnings that they had from their fathers or grandfathers or uncles, while they’re travelling on the sea ice with them—sometimes that traditional knowledge is not reliable because they’re seeing ice conditions that they’ve never seen before,” he explains.
Holwell says that with the fear of unpredictable sea ice, community members are increasingly afraid to hunt and fish. “We’re seeing some, not entirely, loss of culture. But we’re seeing the culture slowly fade away,” he says. “The sea ice is essential for us, for Inuit, to go out and travel to hunt for seals and fish for char. Here in Nain, anywhere we are, you know, we’re surrounded by water. So, in the winter when it freezes, it’s our highway out.”
Hunting and fishing are more than just traditional practices for Inuit. Eating country foods, as many call wild meat, is healthier and it helps Inuit offset the high cost of groceries in the north. In 2023, researchers found that, even with federal food subsidies, Nain had the highest food prices in Canada. Holwell says for the cost of enough store-bought chicken or steaks to feed a family, it’s typically more affordable to hunt. “If you go for a tank of gas and you get a good seal, you know, that could provide a family with three or four meals.”
Ross Flowers of Hopedale is also feeling the impacts of climate change firsthand. “I makes igloos – iluvigak – and I see the big difference in the snow on the snow pattern. We don’t get big banks of snow,” the elder says. “No more hard, compact snow.” Flowers is concerned with the drastic changes, not only in the snow, but in the sea ice and in the strong winds that affect the ocean’s waves.
At 71, he says last winter’s snowfall was so minimal he only had to shovel once to get through the door of his home. The lack of snow also prevented him from building an igloo as he had done in previous winters. He tried, he says, but gave up after the top of his igloo collapsed from the snow melt.
As a child, Flowers would watch the snow pile up to the top of his shed; he could walk up the bank and right onto the roof. Today, that doesn’t happen. “Our snowfall stops, and then probably [we] would get a rainfall,” he says. “It’s really mild and that would make a crust of ice on the snow. And then more snow, and then another rainstorm.”
The lack of snow in the fall and winter also prevents Flowers and others from travelling on snowmobile to harvest wood. Hopedale is the only Nunatsiavut community not surrounded by trees, making snow and sea-ice travel necessary for residents to gather wood to heat their homes in the cold months.
Flowers also sees the impacts of climate change in the animals who rely on sea ice. “The ring seals, when we used to have snow on the ice, they’d have [their pups] under the snow,” he recalls. “I saw them last year — young ones on the hard, blue ice. Right small, right pretty, beautiful looking. They were soaking wet on the hard, blue ice. Before they used to be under the snow in the snow houses.” Now, when ring seal pups are born on the ice, Flowers says they are more vulnerable to predators.
Mental health impacts from cultural loss and food insecurity
In recent years, the loss of ecosystems, landscapes and plant and animal species, and the corresponding emotional toll on humans, has come to be known as ‘ecological grief’ or ‘climate grief’, which include a variety of emotions like anxiety, sadness and despair.
Jessica Winters is from Makkovik but now lives in St. John’s. The Inuk painter and textile artist’s works include environmental landscapes, with depictions of the lichen that reminds her of being home on the land. She is a part of the Sustainable Nunatsiavut Futures team, which researches the social, ecological, and oceanographic sciences to inform decision-making around climate change in Nunatsiavut communities.
Winters says she has experienced climate grief, but that concerns for the natural environment have been pushed to the back of her mind as the intensity of the world’s political climate has swelled. “It just seems like everything else has gotten so much worse in the past five years. Like there’s wars now, and that has become the new normal,” Winters says. “It was a privilege to kind of be able to worry about the climate.”
The Sustainable Nunatsiavut Futures project, a partnership between Dalhousie University and Nunatsiavut Government funded by the Ocean Frontier Institute, combines Inuit knowledge systems and western science to study climate change impacts in Nunatsiavut communities. The project team is researching the coastal marine environment to provide Nunatsiavut Government with data to support informed decision-making to aid existing traditional knowledge from community members on the changes in the environment.
Winters worries about the mental health of Inuit men who have carried land-based traditions and practices from one generation to the next. “Young men struggle to find their place in communities now because people don’t always rely on that stuff anymore,” Winters explains. “Sort of that, like, traditional lifestyle — I fear that that’s going to be exacerbated with climate change.”
Katelyn Jacque was one of the artists-in-residence during Sustainable Nunatsiavut Futures’ residency program last year in St. John’s. The 22-year-old from Postville says even though she hasn’t been around as long as the elders in her community, she sees the drastic changes happening, especially during the winter season. “I remember having to be able to go trick-or-treating in October and there being ski-doos on the road,” she recalls.
Jacque says the sea ice changes are preventing Inuit from travelling along the north coast of Labrador to transport foods when the community stores run out of supplies from the previous fall. “So by the end of the winter, there’s really not much left in the stores here.”
Jacque worries about the pressures climate change is putting on food security in Nunatsiavut. But like Webb and Winters, she also worries about the mental health impacts on those who can no longer hunt and fish as they used to. “I think the biggest impact of climate change is happening to the older population,” she says. “It’s really taking a toll on their mental health, and they have children and grandchildren that they’d like to pass on all these traditions and all this knowledge to […] and they’re really not able to do it anymore.”
The science behind the sea ice breakup
For Inuit in Nunatsiavut communities, the threats of climate change are an everyday reality. The loss of sea ice, snow, and culture are some of the main factors driving forced adaptation. Jacque hopes Inuit continue voicing their concerns to governments — especially given the province’s drive to continue expanding fossil fuel extraction, contrary to the scientific consensus.
Eric Oliver, a physical oceanographer and associate professor at Dalhousie University, explains human-induced climate change is caused by the global air temperature rising, which is then warming the Earth’s waters. “So, that’s indisputable, and that warming is happening at a greater rate at a higher latitude,” he explains. “So Labrador, being at a higher latitude, has slightly warmer rates of warming.”
Like Winters and Jacque, Oliver is part of the Sustainable Nunatsiavut Future project. He has a doctoral degree in physical oceanography with a research focus on the role of climate change in ocean and climate variability. He also has roots in Rigolet.
For the Sustainable Nunatsiavut Future project to officially determine it is detecting climate change, Oliver says the team would need data-sets and research spanning 30 years, instead of the current six-year data and research the team will have in 2026. But Oliver says this is where Inuit traditional knowledge systems are valuable, since many community members have spent so much time on the ice.
Oliver says the rising air temperatures are just one factor causing rapid changes in sea ice; another is the changing wind patterns. He says growing easterly winds coming from the ocean to the land are increasing sea swells, which break up ice that typically forms in the winter months. “That, in combination with warmer temperatures — they are both delaying ice formation,” he explains.
Climate action strategies
In July, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador released its climate action plan for 2025-2030, divided into two parts: a Climate Change Mitigation Plan and a Climate Change Adaptation Action Plan. The mitigation plan lays out a path for the province to achieve its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 30 per cent by 2030 as part of the global effort to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century. The adaptation plan lays out strategies to help businesses, organizations and governments be prepared for the changing impacts of our climate.
According to the document, average annual temperatures in the province have been at least 1.0°C higher than the historical average for most of this century. The plan also notes that Happy Valley-Goose Bay in central Labrador has seen increased incidences of high temperatures, from 9.8 days per year to 13.7 days per year.
The plan notes a direct link between climate change and the health and well-being of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians. It acknowledges that rising temperatures have increased the risks of mental health issues for Indigenous Peoples in northern parts of the province as traditional food availability, recreational activities, winter transportation networks and ice safety have all been adversely impacted.
While province’s climate strategy includes ambitions to “strengthen partnerships” with Indigenous governments and organizations, the plan doesn’t centre the perspectives and needs of Inuit. However, Nunatsiavut Government announced its own climate strategy four months earlier, in March 2025.
In Part 2 of this 2-part feature, The Independent speaks with one of the architects of Sungiutisaannik Nunatsiavummi Adapt Nunatsiavut: An Inuit Approach to Climate Change Mitigation and Adaption in Nunatsiavut, a plan that addresses the impacts of climate change on the natural environment and Inuit ways of life in Nunatsiavut. Read Part 2 here.
Read part two here
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