These communities continue to rely heavily on subsistence resources – caribou, moose, fish, seals and berries, among many other wild foods. These are also rich cultural landscapes, steeped in thousands of years of survival and flourishing in some of the most hostile weather conditions on the planet.
Our study assessed community vulnerability using measures of historic and projected sea level rise and coastal erosion, participatory GIS maps of community subsistence resources, and representative surveys of each village to determine the importance of each resource potentially at risk. Among other things, we developed an innovative methodology combining physical measures of coastal geomorphology with participatory ethnographic methods and survey data.