Welcome to the project
Coastal Adaptation Strategies in Nunavut
NU-COAST
Stratégies d'adaptation côtière au Nunavut
What is NU-COAST?
The coasts of the Canadian Arctic are essential to Inuit communities, providing food security and serving as cultural spaces and transportation routes. However, coastal environments are increasingly threatened by climate change, including permafrost thaw, sea level rise, and storm events. These risks vary by region, which complicates adaptation strategies, and despite some progress, obstacles remain such as a lack of reliable high-resolution data and research results that can be directly used by decision-makers. In addition, local monitoring and the integration of Indigenous knowledge and Western science are crucial to strengthening community resilience, highlighting the need for community-centered approaches to defining adaptation pathways. ​
​Launched in autumn 2024, NU-COAST aims to developcoastal adaptation tools to minimize risks and increase community resilience to coastal erosion and flooding in the Canadian Central and High Arctic. In collaboration with Kugluktuk and Ausuittuq (Grise Fiord), the project uses a transdisciplinary approach to ensure that coastal adaptation strategies are tailored to the cultural identity of each community.
​
The project includes four work packages:
-
Community Resilience to Coastal Change
-
Assessment and Monitoring
-
Coastal Hazard Analysis and Mapping
-
Mobilize Research Findings to Develop Adaptation Strategies
Work packages
1. Community Resilience to Coastal Change
To implement adaptation actions, decision makers need to understand the nature of vulnerability to climate change in terms of who and what are vulnerable, to what stresses, in what way, and why, and also the capacity to adapt. Such information is also essential for empowering communities, households, and individuals to manage the risks and opportunities posed by climate change. This work package aims document how the community is exposed and sensitive to coastal change and their capacity to adapt. The results obtained will also be used to inform the second work package.
2. Assessment and Monitoring
This work package aims to establish coastal observatories and build local capacity in arctic coastal science. These observatories are a central component of the project, serving the basis for a people-centered, bottom-up approach, combined with new technologies, model development and constant retroaction between work packages to make the project outcomes and outputs meaningful for local organizations (Hamlets, HTOs), the Nunavut Government (GN) and the Federal Government. The main objective of this work package is collect baseline data to understand the current conditions, detect changes over time, and support model development.
3. Coastal Hazard Analysis and Mapping
Based on work packages 1 and 2, this package aims to incorporate local knowledge and needs into the data acquired for the development and validation of dynamic multi-scale modelling tools for coastal hazard mapping.
4. Mobilize Research Findings to Develop Adaptation Strategies
This work pacakage focuses on disseminating research findings by generating scientific products that can be used directly by local decision-makers. It works closely with community organizations to facilitate the integration of scientific findings into decision-making processes.
Funded through the NRCan CRCC program
Supported by the Climate-Resilient Coastal Communities Program of Natural Resources Canada
Our partners
