In the summer of 2001, I spent 66 days kayaking alone down the Nahanni, Liard and Mackenzie rivers in Canada’s Northwest Territories. I saw few people on the wild Nahanni or muddy Liard. But once I reached the Mackenzie, part of the second-longest river system on the continent, I had to give way to tugboats pulling huge barges loaded with gas, heating fuel, dried food and other supplies to roadless First Nations communities downstream from the village of Wrigley, where the Mackenzie Highway ends in Alberta. Many cold, foggy nights I was awakened in my tent by the deafening sound of tugboat horns.
Those honks are heard far less often now. The Mackenzie, which flows northwest to the Arctic Ocean, is part of the continent’s second-longest river system, but sometimes the water isn’t deep enough to float the barges. In fact, the government-owned company that operates the tugboats stopped service entirely this year after it became clear there wasn’t enough water in the river, even in late spring when the ice melted. In June, the Canadian Coast Guard said services were “impacted” on nearly 1,000 miles of river, including surface response and maintenance of aids to navigation.
With fresh and dry foods, essential building materials and fuel being flown in and prices soaring, residents of five communities in the Saftu region are stepping up their demands on the Canadian government to build a C$1 billion road and bridge that will provide a lifeline connecting residents to other communities and services in the south. Currently, many people are conserving fuel and bringing food from the south while on vacation or undergoing medical checkups or treatment.
The McEnanys River has never been this low before, and all signs suggest that climate change will make the situation worse.
During previous low water levels, supplies were trucked thousands of miles from south to north along the Alaxa and Dempster Highways, then transported up the Mackenzie River from the Arctic Ocean, but this workaround has never been undertaken for such long periods of time and with such low water levels, and there are signs that climate change will make the situation worse.
“The big question for people who live around here is what’s going to happen next year and the year after as the weather gets warmer and the rivers continue to dry up,” said Todd McCauley, who is leading the campaign to build the road that his mother, a Dene First Nations chief, advocated for years ago.
“If you look at the bay on the Mackenzie River, you’ll see barges [from the Arctic Ocean] “There’s no water on the pier at Norman Wells, only mud.”
“The North has long been seen as a source of resources — beavers, furs, timber, metals, oil and gas — all developed by Southern companies funded by Southern banks to benefit far-flung Southern markets,” says Fort Good Hope resident Charles McNeely, chairman of the Dene and Métis-run Saftu Secretariat, which is responsible for delivering a range of services to the region’s five communities.
“Instead, the North has taken our lands and resources and torn our families apart. [by the residential school program]”Our culture and language were discredited and our children were abused. It wasn’t a fair exchange at all. Why not try something different for a change?”
The Dempster Highway cuts through the desolate countryside of northern Canada, and remote villages are working to build another similar road to transport essential goods.
Brian Martin/Alamy Stock Photo
For many years, most Arctic rivers have seen reduced water levels during mid- to late summer due to increasingly hot and dry weather, reduced winter snowpack and rapidly melting ice fields. While boating down the Alaskan side of the Yukon River in June with retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Skip Ambrose, Ambrose said he had never seen river levels so low in his 50 years of surveying peregrine falcon nests. Great Slave Lake, the fifth-largest lake in North America that flows into the Mackenzie River, is also at a record low.
But water scarcity is not the only stress facing people living along the Yukon and Mackenzie rivers. Rising water levels caused by snow melting much earlier in the year are also causing chaos. In 2021, flooding occurred in the Hay, Mackenzie and Little Buffalo river systems, causing $40 million in damages. In 2023, rising water levels along the Yukon River in Eagle, Alaska, caused water to flow into roads and hotels.
John Pomeroy, a water expert at the University of Saskatchewan, has suggested that northern residents should prepare for more powerful storms brought on by climate change, which is also accelerating the retreat of glaciers and causing permafrost and snowpack to melt sooner and in shorter periods of time.
“We can expect higher and earlier water levels, higher flood peaks and reduced water levels on hot summer days,” he said, warning of serious implications for water management and navigation.
Conservationists worry that a vote in favor of the road would strengthen the case of other interests seeking to build roads in the Arctic.
Pomeroy’s observations have been replicated in other studies, some of which are more recent. calculated Flows of 486,493 rivers across the Arctic from 1984 to 2018. Scientists found large changes in the rate and timing of river flow between spring snow and ice melt and summer river discharge.
Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently combined field observations with numerical modeling to determine how 8.7 million square miles of the Arctic could change over the next 80 years. By 2100, the scientists predict that runoff from underground waterways in the far north will increase by 25 percent, and precipitation will also increase, but late spring and summer flows will decrease.
Yukon glaciers that have broken off from the St. Elias Ice Field, one of the world’s largest, have lost 22 percent of their surface area since 1958. The Brintnell-Bologna Ice Field in the Ragged Mountains of the Northwest Territories, which feeds meltwater into the Mackenzie River system, is disappearing even more rapidly.
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Saftu residents have long been calling on the Canadian government to build about 200 miles of two-lane gravel roads. The roads are estimated to cost at least $700 million to build, and in 2018 the government allocated about $70 million for feasibility studies. But last February, Canada’s environment minister announced that the government would no longer invest in large-scale new road construction. Money that would be spent on asphalt and concrete “would be better invested in projects that help combat climate change and adapt to its effects,” Minister Steven Guilbeault said.
Following the public outcry, Northwest Territories MP Michael McLeod was quick to clarify, as was Guilbeault, that the Mackenzie Valley Highway was still on the table.
Still, conservationists worry that voting in favor of the road would strengthen the case of other communities and mining companies that have sued for roads in other parts of the Arctic, such as mining companies and Inuit in the Kitikmeot region of the central Arctic, who have sued for roads there, but so far have not been successful. port Construct a road along the Arctic coast from Bathurst Inlet to a complex of mines and mining exploration sites inland.
Earlier this year, the Canadian Inuit territory of Nunavut hired an engineering firm to 450 Mile Road The road would link four communities west of Hudson Bay. Another 200-mile route is also being considered to reach the more remote interior community of Baker Lake. Neither these roads, nor the Mackenzie Valley Highway, could be built without significant funding from the federal government.
To understand why the federal government is reluctant to fund Arctic roads, it helps to understand the fate of other northern highways and how a rapidly warming Arctic might affect such infrastructure.
Saftu people have invested more money into conservation and carbon capture than any other jurisdiction in the South.
Opened to the public in 2017, the $300 million, 87-mile all-weather road from Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories was supposed to bring tourists to the Inuvialuit town of Tuktoyaktuk and lower the costs of energy development along the Arctic coast. But few tourists were willing to make the long, arduous drive, and oil and gas companies pulled out of the area before the road was completed. Today, Tuktoyaktuk is slowly sinking into the ocean due to rising sea levels, powerful storm surges, and rapidly melting permafrost.
Maintaining roads in the Arctic has also proven costly. Just a few years after the Inuvik to Tuk highway was completed, the government spent another $13.5 million to raise the road in areas where the permafrost was thawing. Climate-related maintenance costs for the Yukon highway network include: $169,000 per yearSince 1994, in 2021 dollars.
Duane Froese, a University of Alberta scientist who has studied permafrost in the Saftu region for the past few years, said the Mackenzie Valley Highway isn’t likely to cause too many headaches.
“There’s less permafrost and icy permafrost compared to the highway from Inuvik to Tuk,” he said. “Most of the route is along plains, and the likelihood of significant ice presence in that area is low.”
Left: A grocery store in Fort Good Hope, where a litre of milk costs $12. Right: Saftu Executive Director Charles McNealy.
Saftu Secretariat
There are several reasons why environmental groups have been silent on this issue. First, the Mackenzie Road right of way does not pass through any important wildlife corridors like the Bathurst Inlet Road. Second, they do not want to jeopardize their relationship with the people of the Western Arctic because there is still a lot of wildlife left to protect and they need the Dene as partners because they own and have rights to large swaths of land.
The Saftu people have put more money into conservation and carbon capture than any other jurisdiction in the South, and they have agreed to allow the creation of a new national park. Naatziccho They have established themselves in their territories, and organizations such as the Northern Songbird Initiative and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society have praised them recently Agree to protect 4,000 square miles of carbon-rich wetlands along the Rampart River near Fort Good Hope.
The Sakhtu hope the road will make it easier and cheaper to receive basic necessities, but they also hope it will create economic opportunities as tourists, climbers, hikers and canoeists visit the new park and the area’s pristine mountains and tundra rivers.
Proponents of the road, like McCauley, say there’s another reason: It would help clear mountains of scrap metal, broken-down vehicles, leaking batteries and other toxic materials from mining and other development activities that have built up for decades in First Nations communities along the Mackenzie River and Inuit communities in the Arctic Islands.
“The first two roads,” the Dempster Highway and the Inuvik to Tuk road, “were built to get resources out of the North,” said McNealy of the Saftu secretariat. The next road, which McNealy plans to call Trudeau Road if the current prime minister approves it, “will bring the world into the North.”
