In the last 50 years, in the Arctic, warming is proceeding at almost double the rate of the rest of the world (Ford et al., 2018).
At the Northern Store in Aklavik, Northwest Territories, a bottle of Gatorade cost $8.25 last year. Aklavik is just north of the 68th parallel. Polar night lasts a full thirty days here before the sun rises again in January. In the summer, the town is surrounded by more water than land - the unique permafrost landscape that creates thousands of lakes in Canada’s far north. Nearly impossible to construct roads through the challenging landscape, the town is only accessible by air - except in the winter.
In the winter, when the average temperature sinks to -20˚C, the lakes and rivers surrounding Aklavik freeze and thicken, becoming so strong that you can drive vehicles over it. From late December to April, ice roads can be temporarily constructed so that the town is accessible by cars and trucks.
This project investigated seven of these isolated communities, and applied a Vulnerability Index to determine those at the highest risk from climate change. The index combines four factors: road season length, change in season length, average winter temperature change and Community Price Index. This combination creates a scale from 0 - 4, with communities at a higher level being the most vulnerable.
The four selected factors represent both the exposure (temperature change, road season length) and sensitivity (Community Price Index, road season changes) of each studied community. A composite index combines these factors into a single scale, simplifying the complex variables into a ranked list that makes it easier for organizations to prioritize.
How do climate exposure, economic sensitivity and infrastructure dependence interact to define overall vulnerability to climate change among ice road-dependent communities in the Northwest Territories?
The seven communities selected for study had several key factors in common:
By narrowing our focus to communities which met all of these criteria, we can make clear comparisons between them.
The Northwest Territories has well-established winter road networks, and its location in the far north makes it vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
I took the open and close dates as tracked over the last 5 years (2020-2025) for each ice road to get the total average season length in days (GNWT, 2024).
I compared that number to the average open and close dates from the years 2007-2012, to get a difference in days in the average season length in that timeframe.
I used climate averages from the nearest available station for thirty year periods (Environment and Climate Change Canada, 2020) and compared average temperatures from the period 1980-2010 to the period 1990-2020.
The last metric I included in the Vulnerability Index is the Community Price Index (Statistics Northwest Territories, 2019). This metric compares the costs in each seven communities to a baseline of 100, which represents Yellowknife.
These four variables were then standardized across a common scale by applying min-max logic to a 0-1 scale, with 0 indicating a low impact on vulnerability and a 1 indicating a high impact on vulnerability. A simple summation was then applied, making a vulnerability index ranging from a possible 0-4. All variables were given an equal weighting, as there is no clear consensus on the relative impacts of these factors at the time of writing.
Here, the seven communities are shown along with their combined Vulnerability score and their nearest weather station. We can see that Aklavik, the community furthest to the north, has the highest vulnerability score of 2.50 out of a possible 4. However, there is no broader correlation between latitude and vulnerability. Aklavik owes its high score to two factors - it is one of the only communities whose season length has shortened in the last five years vs 2007-2012 (Figure 3), and its 30-year average winter temperature has risen by 1.83˚C decade-over-decade (Figure 4).
The exposure metrics - average temperature changes and ice road season length, corresponded negatively with each other (Table 1). This could indicate that a shorter season length also increases adaptive capacity through necessity, however this index was not able to reliably capture adaptive capacity in a quantitative metric. The sensitivity metrics - prices and season length changes, were very telling in the vulnerability index. The season length change, in particular, corresponded most closely with the vulnerability index results.
This study analyzed how climate exposure, economic sensitivity and infrastructure dependence interact to define overall vulnerability to climate change among ice road-dependent communities in the Northwest Territories.
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View the full paper with references:
Climate Vulnerability in Winter Road-Dependent Northern Communities
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