Tag: climate

This article was written by Jenn Thornhill Verma and Ivan Semeniuk, and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 17, 2025.

If 2025 was the year that climate change was supposed to take a back seat to more pressing matters, then there’s one part of the planet that didn’t get the memo.

On Tuesday, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its annual Arctic Report Card – a collection of concise, peer-reviewed summaries that aims to capture how the climate is behaving at Earth’s northern extremes, including in Canada.

The latest version comes with some big implications for those who live in the Arctic. If efforts to mitigate fossil fuel emissions, the main drivers of climate change, are sidelined, then northern communities will be even further pressed to adapt to a changing environment – and more quickly.

“The Arctic is getting warmer, the Arctic is getting wetter, the Arctic is getting greener,” said Chris Derksen, director of Environment and Climate Change Canada’s climate research division. “Year over year, it may seem like an incremental change, but over 20 years, the body of evidence for the holistic changes to the Arctic – they just become clear.”

A well-known feature of climate change is that the Arctic is warming several times faster than the rest of the planet on average. This year’s Arctic Report Card confirms that the region has just logged its warmest year since 1900 – a new extreme that follows the general trend.

Other broken records in 2025 include the lowest maximum sea ice extent in the 47year satellite record, the warmest fall on record and the highest annual precipitation since tracking began.

Multiyear sea ice – the thick, old ice that once dominated the Arctic – has declined 95 per cent since the 1980s, with what remains now largely confined to coastal areas around Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. That difference alone is set to utterly transform the Arctic.

As the report card notes, “The profound changes in sea ice since 2005 are opening the Arctic to more human activity and bringing to the fore concerns about safety, security and the environment.”

Dr. Derksen added that the report card serves as “an annual checkup on what’s happening in the Arctic.” But increasingly, the ocean and lands it describes are beginning to look like an entirely new sort of patient.

NOAA began issuing its report card in 2006 as a way to highlight Arctic change for a broad audience, including policy makers. Canadian experts are among the 112 scientists from 13 countries that authored this year’s 20th edition of the document.

Notwithstanding its international flavour, the effort has always been organized and led by U.S. researchers and is presented each December at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Tuesday’s release comes at an especially fraught time for circumpolar science and collaboration.

Earlier this year, the U.S. administration, guided by President Donald Trump’s open contempt for concerns about climate change, cut hundreds of staff, including scientists, from NOAA’s ranks. Others were blocked from attending international meetings and avoided speaking openly on international calls.

For Canadian scientists, the situation comes with a hint of déjà vu. The last time politics got in the way of U.S. and Canadian climate scientists working together on joint projects such as the Arctic report card, it was prime minister Stephen Harper’s government that furnished the roadblocks.

Yet this year’s report card is surprisingly candid about the barriers, such as “cutbacks in funding and logistical support for Arctic research and spaceborne monitoring capabilities in the United States and the European Union.” Of the 31 observing systems it assesses, 23 depend on U.S. federal support.

Dr. Derksen, whose division works with U.S. counterparts on the report’s snow monitoring, described the impact of entire federal departments in upheaval, compounded by an extended government shutdown.

“You can’t have business as usual when it comes to scientific collaborations when you have disruptions of that scale,” he said.

During a news conference on Tuesday, U.S. authors of the report card acknowledged the challenges they faced.

Twila Moon, a climate scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., and an editor of the report card, said international collaboration helped fill the gaps. “Bumps can happen,” she said. “This was another year where we saw people stepping up, making things happen, working extra time and really hustling, because all of us believe that this is incredibly important information.”

Yet political realities cast a shadow on the briefing once it was apparent that participants, in contrast to previous years, could not speak openly about why the Arctic climate is changing so dramatically.

Repeating a phrase uttered by NOAA’s administrator Neil Jacobs during his congressional confirmation hearings, NOAA’s acting chief scientist, Steve Thur, merely stated that “there is a human role.”

For Canada, home to a vast Arctic coastline and the planet’s third-largest reserve of glacial ice, the strained relations with its closest research partner highlight the need for more domestic monitoring. The country’s own observing systems and Indigenous-led research networks are becoming more critical.

Globally, emissions-reduction efforts have stalled – last month’s COP30 summit ended without a fossil fuel phase-out road map and with new national climate plans delivering less than 15 per cent of the emissions cuts needed to hold warming to 1.5 C.

“Inuit Nunangat is at the forefront of climate change, and irreversible changes are occurring in our homeland,” said Denise Baikie, manager of policy advancement at Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national representational organization for Inuit in Canada. (Inuit Nunangat refers to the Inuit homeland, spanning four regions and most of Canada’s Arctic coastline.)

“Our adaptation costs and needs will grow whether or not global temperatures remain within 1.5 or 2.0 degrees. ITK is deeply concerned that Canada won’t meet its emissions targets.”

CHANGES BY SEA AND LAND

This year’s report card documents a litany of changes that are reshaping Arctic ecosystems and outpacing the models scientists use to predict them. Among those highlighted are:

Atlantification

This is the intrusion of warm, salty Atlantic water several hundred kilometres into the central Arctic Ocean. It is happening because a cold-water barrier called the halocline, which historically kept heat trapped at depth and protected sea ice from below, has lost roughly 30 per cent of its stability over three decades.

Climate models have projected that atlantification would not reach the western Arctic Ocean this century; yet, the report card documents evidence to the contrary. In the coastal seas north of Europe, August sea surface temperatures were as much as 7 C warmer than the 1991-2020 average. On Canada’s Atlantic side, the cold Labrador Current still acts as a buffer – but the report card suggests this is a delay, not a reprieve.

Borealization

Warming bottom waters, declining sea ice and rising plankton levels are driving the northward expansion of southern marine species and sharp declines in Arctic species – disrupting commercial fisheries, food security and Indigenous subsistence. In the northern Bering and Chukchi Seas, roughly one-third of Arctic species examined are declining; snow crab and Arctic cod are losing ground while walleye pollock and yellowfin sole push north. Plankton productivity has spiked – up 80 per cent in the Eurasian Arctic, 34 per cent in the Barents Sea and 27 per cent in Hudson Bay since 2003. The result has disrupted the food webs on which Arctic communities depend.

Toxic rivers

Across Alaska, iron and toxic metals released by melting permafrost have turned streams in more than 200 watersheds visibly orange over the past decade. The increased acidity and elevated metal levels

have degraded water quality, eroded biodiversity and in some streams exceeded safe drinking water guidelines for cadmium and nickel. Similar chemical processes have been documented in Canada’s Yukon and Mackenzie watersheds, though visible rusting has not yet been reported at the same scale.

Water security

Glaciers in Arctic Scandinavia and Svalbard experienced their largest annual net loss on record between 2023 and 2024; Alaskan glaciers have lost an average of 38 metres of ice since the mid-20th century. In Canada’s northernmost community, Grise Fiord (Ausuittuq) in Nunavut, the pressure is tangible.

“The glaciers here on Ellesmere Island are disappearing faster than we thought they would, or people predicted,” said Meeka Kiguktak, the mayor of Grise Fiord. The hamlet – situated closer to the North Pole than to Southern Canada – relies on glacier runoff and iceberg water as its only sources of freshwater and is now building a new water plant.

“Ausuittuq means the place that never melts,” Ms. Kiguktak said. “It’s melting now, so we gotta change the name of our community soon.”

Melting glaciers are not the only change the community has witnessed: This year, sea ice arrived late and so rough that hunters couldn’t find seal holes, pushing the season back a month; narwhals and belugas stayed until late October, weeks past normal.

A TRADITION OF WATCHFULNESS

While the changes now evident across the Arctic are historically unprecedented, the report card notes that survival in the region has always depended on close observation of the environment. Only recently has the value of this tradition been fully appreciated. “For too long, Arctic research has treated Indigenous peoples as ‘informants’ or ‘stakeholders,’ ” the report card states, adding that Indigenous experts who combine Western and traditional knowledge to care for their lands and waters “have always been scientists.”

Philippe Archambault, a marine scientist at Laval University who leads the research network ArcticNet, said that he and his colleagues have benefited from the realization that Indigenous peoples in the Arctic constitute a permanent community of observers and analysts. By partnering with them, he said, “we’re doing our work in a more effective way.”

In Canada, Inuit Nunangat is on the verge of complete climate strategy coverage. In 2019, ITK released the National Inuit Climate Change Strategy. The Inuvialuit Settlement Region adopted its strategy in 2021; Nunavik published an adaptation plan in 2024; and Nunatsiavut released its climate strategy this year. When Nunavut’s territory-wide strategy is released next year, it will close the loop: co-ordinated climate frameworks across a vast territory, built from the ground up by the communities most affected.

“Inuit know what’s happening and what’s needed,” Ms. Baikie said. “Decisions about our homeland must be inclusive of Inuit as rights holders and knowledge holders.”

This co-operation stands in contrast to the federal picture. Canada’s Climate Competitiveness Strategy, released in November, has been criticized for lacking Indigenous input. That same month, federal cabinet minister Steven Guilbeault resigned over the rollback of climate policies he had championed, including carbon pricing and the oil-and-gas emissions cap. And a report by the University of Waterloo’s Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation found Arctic coastlines are eroding by up to 40 metres a year – yet Canada lacks a co-ordinated national framework for shoreline management.

The report card sits alongside a growing ecosystem of Arctic assessments: the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP, the Arctic Council’s scientific arm) produces circumpolar reports; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has its seventh assessment under way, with a synthesis report expected by late 2029; and Canada’s own national assessment, Canada’s Changing Climate, is expected next spring (published every five years, the last was published in 2019). Together, these reports build a layered picture of Arctic change from global to local scales.

But Canada has no equivalent to NOAA’s report card, and federal Arctic science remains fragmented: Natural Resources Canada tracks permafrost and glacier change, Fisheries and Oceans Canada produces Arctic seas reports, while Environment and Climate Change Canada monitors snow and ice.

Dr. Archambault said the situation resembles that of a medical patient who hears only from specialists, without reference to a broader prognosis.

“What we need now is to synthesize, to bring all these different streams of information together in a more cohesive way,” he said.

For John Smol, an ecologist at Queen’s University in Kingston who was just awarded Norway’s Mohn Prize for outstanding Arctic research, the distributed and costly nature of polar science means the region is getting less attention than it should from Canadians over all.

“We’re fickle with the environment,” Dr. Smol said, noting how the country’s vast northern wilderness seems to recede when the national discussion is focused on more immediate matters.

In the long run, however, Canada must prioritize the Arctic and its rapid transformation. Otherwise, he added, “we’re sleepwalking to disaster.”