Health and Wellbeing among Arctic Indigenous Peoples: Leveraging Legal Determinants of Health – The Arctic Institute
February 4, 2025
The Arctic Institute Health and Wellbeing Series 2025
- The Arctic Institute Health and Wellbeing Series 2025: Introduction
- Health and Wellbeing among Arctic Indigenous Peoples: Leveraging Legal Determinants of Health
News Update
- The Arctic is increasingly warmer, less frozen, and wetter, with regional extremes in weather, climate patterns, and ecosystem responses.
- The summer of 2023 was the warmest in the Arctic since 1900.
Climate change is real and threatens the livelihood of Arctic Indigenous peoples. It does so by negatively impacting relational connections between the environmental ecosystem and Indigenous peoples residing in the Circumpolar North. The Arctic is home to approximately four million people, nine percent of whom are Indigenous peoples living in Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, and the United States and comprise many different groups. Among these groups are Inuit, Athabaskan, Gwich’in and Sami peoples. Notably, the Arctic environment is distinct in that the “majority of Arctic settlements are located on permafrost, and nearly half of them are coastal permafrost settlements.”1)
