Innovation exceeds fear of climate change in Greenland

Greenland is central to climate research and research now shows that Greenlanders are far more aware of a rapidly changing Arctic climate than of the underlying global causes. However, their willingness to harness new opportunities exceeds fear of climate change’s consequences.

Citizens and policymakers generally hold strong opinions on whether anthropogenic climate change merits mitigative action or not. Yet, scientific consensus indicates that contemporary governance regimes are unable to address cascading risks within existing legal and policy frameworks1,2. Through Arctic amplification, northern high-latitude regions are already experiencing increases of ≥3 °C, far above the COP21 Paris Agreement’s goal to limit Earth’s warming to ≤1.5 °C (refs. 1,3). Arctic residents are therefore well versed in dramatic environmental and socio-ecological changes experienced in recent decades on land and at sea, which substantially affect their lives and livelihoods4,5. Now, writing in Nature Climate Change, Kelton Minor and colleagues6 reveal that close familiarity with extreme weather, symptomatic of a warming climate, within a given Arctic populace does not necessarily equate with an understanding of the underlying global causes.

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Fig. 1: Depictions of modern pastoralism and its various innovations in South Greenland.

B. C. Forbes (top left and right); F. Stammler (bottom left and right)

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Acknowledgements

We are deeply indebted to the many Greenlanders who engaged in valuable discussions on the topics discussed, while we alone are responsible for the opinions expressed. Our fieldwork in Greenland has been supported by NSF Grant RCN no. 1503884; NSF Grants NNA no. 1928230 and no. 2126794; the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement no. 869471; and the Academy of Finland’s WIRE project no. 342462.

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  1. Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland

    Bruce C. Forbes & Florian Stammler

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  1. Bruce C. Forbes
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Bruce C. Forbes.

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Forbes, B.C., Stammler, F. Innovation exceeds fear of climate change in Greenland.
Nat. Clim. Chang. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01714-4

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  • Published: 26 June 2023

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01714-4

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