Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

The Canadian Arctic is experiencing acute and chronic challenges to human and environmental wellbeing as a result of climate change. These challenges are especially prominent among Inuit populations, who must deal with climate change impacts in addition to repercussions of colonization and loss of traditional cultures. As Inuit are intrinsically tied to their environments, climate change affects all dimensions of wellbeing and interacts with other social determinants of health. These ongoing struggles with both past and present challenges create a complex field within which to generate population health interventions that are culturally relevant and sustainable. To respond to these challenges, we are pursuing a participatory approach to develop an environment-health surveillance system in the Inuit community of Rigolet, Nunatsiavut. Building from a strong local research capacity in this community, we will integrate and streamline environment-health data to monitor and respond to current pathways of environmental changes and associated impacts on health. Due to the ways in which current health-related challenges are shaped and perpetuated by historical experiences in this region, it is important to prioritize Inuit perspectives and worldviews when pursuing meaningful environment-health surveillance. As such, we need to understand: local perspectives on environmental change; how these changes are currently dealt with; and what health-related impacts are most important to monitor in this community. Co-development of project design and implementation with Inuit partners will facilitate meaningful engagement of community members and address concerns in a culturally-appropriate manner. Eventually, this participatory approach to surveillance will be used with other Inuit communities in the Circumpolar North, to establish population health interventions that empower communities to improve and sustain good wellbeing in the context of climate change.