By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
LONDON (Reuters) - A "grab for the Arctic" will add strains to indigenous hunters' cultures as a record melt opens the icy region to shipping or oil and gas exploration, an Inuit activist said on Tuesday.
Sheila Watt-Cloutier, who is among those tipped to win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on October 12, said global warming was happening twice as fast in the Arctic as elsewhere on the planet with mainly negative consequences for indigenous peoples.
"There is a real sudden grab for everything up here in the Arctic," she told the Reuters Environment Summit in a telephone interview from Iqualuit, northern Canada.
"It's the speed of change that worries me more than anything else," she said, adding that hunters had scant time to adapt.
The Arctic summer ice shrank to its smallest on record last month, eclipsing the previous 2005 record by more than 20 percent, according to U.S. satellite data dating back 30 years.
Watt-Cloutier said an opening of the fabled Northwest Passage for several weeks this summer through a maze of normally icebound Canadian islands might herald a new international shipping route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
That could bring new wrenching change for people in a remote, sparsely populated region where Watt-Cloutier, 53, said she only ever traveled by dog sled up to the age of 10.
"What direction are we taking as an Inuit society? How is it we are going to deal with these monumental changes?" she said. Continued...
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