Climate change is no longer an abstract idea in northern Canada. The issue comes up all the time in everything from casual conversations to scientific journals. But getting a handle on what it all means is another matter.

For the last year and a half the Northern Climate ExChange, along with a number of other partners, has been tracking down documented information on climate change in northern Canada.

Information was gathered from libraries, scientific journals, conference proceedings, and other sources; both traditional and local knowledge were also sought out and included.

"There has been a lot of talk about climate change in northern Canada, but there has not been a good sense of what we know," says Aynslie Ogden, the project research officer with the Northern Climate ExChange. "We wanted to get a better sense of what we do and do not know."

They found a vast amount of information on climate change in northern Canada, and making sense of it all was the next big challenge. Northern Canada was divided it into 17 different systems, and each of these in turn was broken down into its main components.

Next they looked at how factors such as changes in precipitation and temperature might affect those various components. The final step was to rank how much is known about future impacts.

Most of the hard and fast information was on physical characteristics such as ice; in many other areas, the state of knowledge was judged to be poor.

For example, there is little understanding of how climate change will affect communities. Even more of a gap exists on what sorts of adaptations communities can make, and how they can minimize the effects of climate change.

Ogden says that it is not too early for communities to start factoring climate change right into their budget plans. During the workshop in Mayo, for example, it was pointed out that warmer winter temperatures could produce more potholes in the roads, meaning that more money would be needed for road maintenance.

Some wildlife managers are already starting to look at how deeper snow could affect ungulates such as caribou. If herd sizes start to decrease, harvest levels might need to be adjusted as well.

Changes in the climate are often mentioned when traditional knowledge is collected, but Ogden would like to see a traditional knowledge project focused on climate change.

Overall Ogden says that this project pointed out the need for more monitoring in the North. "One of the things this study really points to is not just the lack of climate change monitoring, but of monitoring in general. It really points to the need for a pan-northern monitoring effort."

The 17 matrices are available on the Internet at www.taiga.net/nce. Other information on the project is also available on the taiga net web site, and eventually a CD Rom will be produced.

For more information call the Northern Climate ExChange at 668-8735.