Arctic melt threatens indigenous people

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.

Oil and gas were likely to be the main draw, bringing risks of spills, if the thaw continues as forecast by U.N. climate scientists. Some U.S. official estimates are that a quarter of the world's undiscovered reserves may be in the Arctic.

GOLD, DIAMONDS

"In many parts of Canada, there is uranium being talked about, iron ore, diamonds, gold ... these all have with them very negative long-term impacts" for traditional Inuit society, she said.

Some hunters were shifting to adapt to change. Cod were swimming north in huge numbers and hunters used to catching seals "are losing one way of life in terms of the seals but they are gaining in terms of fisheries".

Changes around Iqualuit this summer included a type of black fly appearing further north than normal even though the summer overall had been cool and wet.

And Canada might in future have to defend the Arctic because of competing interests with other states over shipping rights or oil and gas. Russia planted a flag on the seabed beneath the North Pole in August in a symbolic claim.

"I would hate to see the Arctic become an extension of an army camp, (with) Canada trying to assert itself," she said.

Watt-Cloutier is a former head of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference which says it represents 150,000 people in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Russia.

She has tried to put pressure on the United States and other major emitters of greenhouse gases to cut emissions from burning fossil fuels, saying climate change is a form of human rights abuse.