TORONTO (Reuters)
- Climate change unseen since the Ice Age is threatening a third
of the world's habitat and could leave natives in the Arctic in
ruin, the Inuit people of Canada said Wednesday.
A report released
by the World Wildlife Federation For Nature warned that the Earth's
temperature was rising at such a rapid speed that many animal
and plant species will likely perish.
Violet Ford,
policy advisor for the Canadian Inuit -- also known as Eskimos
-- warned that destruction of Arctic wildlife will do likewise
to the livelihood of the nearly 120,000 Inuit in the northern
areas of Alaska, Greenland, Russia and Canada.
"If carbon
dioxide concentrations double in the atmosphere in the next 100
years as predicted (in a report), the effects on the Arctic environment,
animals and people are going to be catastrophic," Ford told
a news conference in Toronto.
The report
warned that 35 percent of the Earth's existing natural habitat
could be "fundamentally altered" in the next 100 years.
This would force today's animals and plants to adapt faster than
the ancient saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoth, who roamed
the earth 13,000 years ago, before dying at the end of the last
Ice Age.
Only now the
rate of warming is much faster, according to the report.
The loss of
species could be as high as 20 percent in sensitive ecosystems
such as northern Canada, the Tibetan Plateau and in southeastern
Australia, according to the report.
The areas
most affected by annual temperature increases, which could be
between two and eight degrees Celsius (3.6 and 14.5 Fahrenheit)
by the end of the century, will be the boreal and Arctic regions.
Here, estimates point to a 60 percent destruction of the habitat.
This comes
as little surprise to the Inuit. They have noticed that near Hudson
Bay, Canada's gateway to the north seas, ice is thinner and has
formed seasonably later, affecting polar bears, which usually
ride the thick ice slabs to hunt seals and voyage to their winter
retreat.
They say that
the warming of the tundra, the vast permanently frozen treeless
zone lying between the ice cap and the timber line, has altered
migration routes of caribou, the North American reindeer. The
Inuit rely heavily on these animals as part of their sustainable
way of life.
They also
say they've noticed grizzly bears, wolverines and other insects
and birds that are more commonly found to the south.
U.S. government
researchers reported that average global temperatures over the
last 25 years alone have been increasing at a rate equivalent
to two degrees Celsius a century. Studies show the Arctic sea
ice has also thinned over the last 30 years or so to six feet
(1.8 meters) from 10 feet (3.1 meters) and has shrunk by around
6 percent since 1975.
"The
Arctic is serving as the canary in the coal mine for the global
environment," said Sheila Watt, president of the Inuit Circumpolar
Conference-Canada. "This has been proven in the case of persistent
organic pollutants (POPs), and now its the case with global warming."
If the Inuit
way of life should falter, forcing integration into conventional
society, it would come at a time when they have been winning land
claims from Canada's government, Ford said, allowing them to sustain
their culture.
By splitting
up the Northwest Territories, the Inuit created and are now running
their own vast territory, Nunavut last April 1.
The birth
of Nunavut, 770,000 square miles (2 million sq km) of barren rock,
snow and ice, was a triumph for Inuit leaders who had campaigned
for more than 20 years for the right to control their own destiny.
Representatives
of 180 countries will meet in Lyons, France, next month to work
out how the Kyoto Protocol international agreement to curb greenhouse
gas emissions will be made to work.
The 1997 treaty
will also be the subject of international ministerial talks in
The Hague in November.
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