Edward Alexander, Gwich’in Council International: 65% of Gwich’in homeland where I'm from has burned – in my lifetime.
Brendan Rogers, Woodwell Climate Center: Canada last year was off the charts. We've literally had to remake our charts of fire history.
Chief Bill Erasmus, Arctic Athabaskan Council: 70% of the population in our territory, which is a huge territory, had to evacuate to other centers. It was very scary. We never ever thought that Yellowknife would be evacuated.
Edward Alexander: It would be a deadly assumption, and it would be a wrong assumption to assume that the 2023 fire season is an anomaly or is as severe as wildland fire in Canada will be.
Jessica Cook, Arctic Council Secretariat: You’re listening to This Way Up, the Arctic Council podcast bringing you stories and experiences from the Arctic. I’m Jessica Cook from the Arctic Council Secretariat.
Rosa-Máren Magga, Indigenous Peoples’ Secretariat: And I’m Rosa-Máren Magga from the Indigenous Peoples’ Secretariat. Let’s get into it.
Jessica Cook: When we talk about wildfires, it often brings up pictures of Australia or maybe California because that’s what you see in the news.
Rosa-Máren Magga: I think that a lot of people around the world aren’t aware that the Arctic is on fire too.
Jessica Cook: And you might be thinking, well, why should people around the world care that the Arctic is on fire? And I mean, we’ll get into it during the episode, but for one, Arctic wildfires have some pretty terrifying implications for the world’s climate. But also, one of the more visible answers to this is wildfire smoke.
Do you remember seeing these apocalyptic-like photos coming out of New York City in the summer of 2023 where there was just this red glow and almost no visibility? Even though the wildfires were in Arctic Canada, people a lot further south also faced consequences.
Rosa-Máren, you’re from the Finnish side of Sápmi, how has this region been affected?
Rosa-Máren Magga: We have experienced some fires in different parts of Sápmi - the Sámi land spanning over Norway, Sweden, Finland and Kola Peninsula in Russia. Of course, not to the same extent as the huge wildland fires for example in Siberia and Canada these recent years, but wildland fires are becoming more and more often in Sápmi, too.
Jessica Cook: And how is this impacting the Indigenous Peoples that live there?
Rosa-Máren Magga: This is an increased risk for traditional livelihoods, such as reindeer husbandry, which means keeping and herding reindeer together in a unit. And as a livelihood depending so much on the land, fires can have negative consequences on the pastures. Nowadays in reindeer husbandry the grazing lands are so fragmented due to other land use, such as forest industry and mining industry. And if fires burn the already fragmented pastures, it’s not possible for the reindeer to access lichen and other vegetation that they eat.
Jessica Cook: So, basically, wildfires are adding yet another stressor to reindeer husbandry, which is a livelihood that’s already under stress due to other factors. Can you explain what these consequences are in practice?
Rosa-Máren Magga: I’m from a reindeer herding family and, as an example, one of our neighboring siidas (Siida is a Sámi traditional reindeer herding unit consisting of the reindeer, people and the land and water) was affected by wildland fires some years back due to extreme drought in tundra in the summer. In their case, the fires destroyed parts of their core winter pastures.
Jessica Cook: There are so many aspects of wildfires – or wildland fires as an alternate term – that the topic could be its own podcast series. But in today’s episode, we’re going to focus on how Arctic fires are changing, how they contribute to the climate crisis, the detrimental effects of banning Indigenous cultural burning practices – and how Indigenous fire practices and more could be part of the solution.
First up, let's hear from Edward Alexander, Co-Chair of Gwich’in Council International. Gwich’in Council International is an Indigenous Peoples’ organization, and one of six Permanent Participants of the Arctic Council. Edward speaks about the changes he has witnessed to wildfire in his homelands in the Yukon Flats in northern Alaska.
Edward Alexander: So where, where I live, we live in the boreal forest, which is a very unique kind of forest in the world. It's the largest forest in the world, but it's, a lot of spruce trees, which are very vulnerable to fire, and birch trees and willows. And Yukon Flats is a vast boreal forest with large rivers in it and lakes, meadows, ancient horseshoe lakes and grasslands. It’s a really rich and vibrant area. Animals from around the world, migrate to our homelands to, because it's such a rich environment in the summertime. And so, we get migratory birds from around the world that come to Gwich'in homelands to rear their young and so forth because of the vibrancy of our land. But it's also very vulnerable to wildland fire, as you know, particularly with climate change now. And so, we're seeing an increase in lightning strikes. Those lightning strikes are striking down into these spruce stands and igniting spruce on fire. And then, sort of goes into an uncontrolled burn across the landscape. Nothing to really stop the fire. You know, the grasslands can be really overgrown and dry, especially at the beginning of a summer. And so, the fire can just burn from the timber stems down into the grass and across these meadows and then ignite the stands on the other side and sort of travel like that really quickly across the landscape. And so, we’ve seen an increase and the size of wildfire, you know, so we used to have small fires and not have, the severity we're seeing now.
What is what is the future bringing for our part of the world? And what does that mean as far as how our landscape looks, what kinds of plants do we have there? Is it going to continue to be a beautiful area of forest and vast, beautiful meadows filled with flowers and lots of different kinds of species that are welcoming for migratory birds and, and so forth. Or is it going to be something different than that?
Jessica Cook: It’s important to note here that fire is a natural part of Arctic ecosystems, and some trees for example actually rely on fire to populate forests. But climate change is transforming the fire regime. The Yukon Flats in Alaska have warmed 8.8°F - or 4.5°C - in the last 50 years. This warming has led to longer fire seasons with more frequent and intense fires.
Let’s jump back to 2023. This wildfire season in Canada was the most destructive ever recorded in North American history. More than 6,000 fires burned over 37 million acres. To put that into perspective, that’s an area larger than England and more than double the previous record set in 1989. And unlike other years, these fires were widespread all across the country. The fires pushed the Canadian Fire Service to its limit, even with thousands of international firefighters travelling to Canada to help combat the fires.
The fires in 2023 also challenged existing monitoring systems, as Brenden Rogers, senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center recalls. And just a note, we spoke with Brenden in 2024, so when he refers to last year, he means 2023.
Brendan Rogers, Woodwell Climate Research Center: Canada last year was off the charts. We've literally had to remake our charts of fire history in Arctic boreal North America because what happened in Canada last year. And you have climate warming at the same time. So that’s important to understand. I mean fire is a natural part of the system, a natural part of these landscapes. But with climate change, we're seeing more and more fires. We're seeing more area burn. We're seeing more severe fires, more intense fires.
Jessica Cook: With fires extending beyond known fire behavior, challenging fire charts and management practices, those hit the hardest were people living in the areas engulfed by uncontrolled fires.
Chief Bill Erasmus, Chair of the Arctic Athabaskan Council, recalls the summer of 2023 in northwestern Canada where many Athabaskan Peoples reside.
Chief Bill Erasmus, Arctic Athabaskan Council: So what happened was, the fires began early in the year. Normally they begin in June. And the end, by the end of August. What happened in 2023 is the fires actually started in April and went into October.
So 70% of the population in our territory, which is a huge territory, had to evacuate to other centers, as far as Winnipeg was the furthest away, which is 3000km away. So families were separated. It was really quite an experience. Some people drove out and, as they were driving out, there was fires on both sides of the highway. It was very scary. We never thought ever, that Yellowknife would be evacuated.
So there was mass confusion. People didn't know who they were flying with, how they were going to fly, you know which airlines. Gas stations were – people were lined up at gas stations. There was no fuel left. People really had never prepared for it. So were not quite sure how to go about it.
But there's added problems because, for example, some people are homeless. How do you find these people? Some of them had no IDs. You need an ID to get on an airplane. You need an ID if you’re sent South and you’re living in a hotel. All of these things had to be part of what happened.
Jessica Cook: Some communities had to evacuate twice. And while evacuations are never easy the added remoteness and very limited infrastructure in the Arctic make it a lot more difficult. There are numerous communities in Arctic Canada that are only accessible by plane or boat – there may not even be roads leading to other communities to evacuate on.
But people living in the Arctic and boreal forest unfortunately need to brace themselves for more frequent and intense wildfires.
Edward Alexander: It would be a deadly assumption, and it would be a wrong assumption to assume that the 2023 fire season is an anomaly or is as severe as wildland fire in Canada will be. It certainly broke previous records but there is no reason to think that that's a record that will not be broken itself.
And so, one aspect of the 2023 fire season is kind of understanding that we don't have a fire season any longer in the Arctic, right. The fires that are burning in 2024 are actually 2023 fires.
Jessica Cook: Wait, what? 2024 fires are 2023 fires?
What Edward is referring to are so-called zombie fires. These are fires that are deep in the soil in boreal forests. These soils contain a lot of peat and other organic materials that are highly flammable and dry, so even if it snows on top, zombie fires can persist underground throughout the entire winter. And then, in the springtime when the weather warms, these fires can pop back up above ground, kicking off an early wildfire season.
This leads us to why Arctic wildfires in particular are pretty terrifying – for everyone in the world. About 15% of land in the Northern Hemisphere contains permafrost, or permanently frozen ground. This frozen soil plays a majorly important role for the global climate system, as it stores massive amounts of carbon. As permafrost thaws, which can be accelerated by wildfires, it releases greenhouses gases into our atmosphere, which accelerates climate change. But I’ll let Sue Natali, a Senior Scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, explain more.
Sue Natali, Woodwell Climate Research Center: So in the permafrost region, below ground holds about 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, which is a very hard number for people to understand. That's three times more carbon than is in every tree, in every forest on the planet.
Jessica Cook: Or to put it another way, permafrost holds twice as much carbon than is currently in the atmosphere. So how do fires affect these soils?
Sue Natali: It's essentially like opening the top of a cooler, so you no longer have this ground that insulates, you know, during the summer months, when we think of the Arctic as being quite cold, in the summer can get very warm. And so this ground acts as a very good insulator against this warm summer temperatures. And it protects the permafrost.
So when fire comes through and removes that, then you're essentially removing that protective layer. So you can then post-fire will often have a much deeper thaw that does recover, you know, years to decades depending on where you are. But if you have repeat fires or as we're getting into, you know, warmer climates where you're having fire combined with warmer climate, it is the question is, you know, will these systems recover as they have in the past?
Jessica Cook: Sue explains what it’s like to experience zombie fires.
Sue Natali: You can walk in a place where there's fire and you think there's the surface of the ground is there, and you put your foot on the ground and your foot will sink down into the ground, because there's no more support, because that fire literally burned underneath the ground.
It can also continue to burn under the ground through the winter. So you will have fires that spark up early in spring that never went out from the previous year. So it's like literally burning the ground. And you can see it from the surface sometimes where you have, you know, dips and, you know, kind of holes.
But sometimes you'll see the surface looks like there is a surface there that's just singed. And I've put my foot there and you go sinking down because there's no more support there.
Jessica Cook: So, all this considered, how do fires affect the global climate?
Sue Natali: There's the immediate effect of combustion where you're getting greenhouse gases released as a result of burning of the plants above ground and the plant parts and soils below ground. But then you also have this long term impact, which is much harder for us to quantify and to understand exactly how what that impact is. But because you have this long term effect of fire on ground thaw, you now have this additional carbon pool that was locked away in permafrost.
Jessica Cook: Scientists are aware of the risks of a rapidly warming Arctic, yet the magnitude of the problem may not be fully recognized by policy makers or the public. Some types of permafrost, like one called yedoma, stores even higher concentrations of carbon and methane than other types of permafrost. Yedoma permafrost is found in Siberia, Alaska and the Yukon- where wildfires are increasing.
Carbon emissions from thawing permafrost and intensifying wildfires present a major challenge to meeting the already difficult climate goals. Edward Alexander shares a grim warning.
Edward Alexander: Thinking that we're going to manage this issue with the current wildland firefighting forces that we have in the world is an error. It's a grave error. Some of those permafrost areas, like yedoma, can rapidly melt if they're exposed by a very intense fire. So a later season fire in the North over some of these areas could expose those areas to rapid collapse. And so, leading to, vast amounts of methane and CO2 release, you know, much greater than has ever been seen on the history of the planet.
Jessica Cook: Climate change has altered wildfires in the North and, as a consequence, fires themselves have now become a driver of climate change.
Yet, the way wildfires have been managed the past decades have actually likely contributed to the more intense fires we’re seeing now.
But before we get into that, we’re going to touch on how Indigenous Peoples around the world have learned to live with fire over millennia – until their practices were banned. So-called cultural burning refers to how Indigenous Peoples use fire to take care of the health of the land, animals and people.
Edward Alexander shares how Gwich’in have used fire.
Edward Alexander: So, Gwich'in, you know, we use cultural burning as a method of controlling our environment a little bit. And so, if you think about in the springtime in the North, we have these vast forests and meadows and lake edges and these waterways and so forth. By burning it during this season, when there's snow in the forest, it contains the fire to just the parts that we would like burned. Right? Just the parts that we would like to get rid of. All of the dead grass and all of that thick matter of grass to reduce the risk of fire later, also to fertilize, right. So, when we burn these grassy areas and so forth, you know, it doesn't just come back as grassland. It comes back as, flowers, it comes back as fireweed, it comes back as roses, it comes back as yarrow and other plants that are very beneficial for people and beneficial for other kinds of insects and other kinds of animals out there in the world. And so, you know, there's lots of different lenses that we can look at cultural burning through.
Jessica Cook: Cultural burning has been practiced by Indigenous Peoples across the Arctic. Indigenous fire knowledge holders are familiar with climate cycles, wildfire ignition sources, fire behavior and land features such as topography and vegetation that can act as fuels.
Chief Bill Erasmus from the Arctic Athabaskan Council recalls the traditional practices utilized by his father in the Northwest Territories of Canada.
Chief Bill Erasmus: My father used to use our Dene way of cultural burning. He would burn willows and grass. So, what it would do is he'd do it for a number of reasons. It was so that we get rid of the old growth; new growth would come back. And our People use that for hunting, too. So, when there's new growth, then rabbits go there, the ducks land there, etc. So it's part of hunting. But it's clearing the land so that there's less chance for burns. And so he used to do that and it never got away from him because you do it when it's not windy and you do it when the ground is still damp.
Jessica Cook: Cultural burning has also been used by Indigenous Peoples in Russia, as Vladimir Klimov from the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North, shares with translation by Kseniia Iartceva.
Vladimir Klimov, RAIPON, (translation by Kseniia Iartceva): I was born in a small village. There we had a lot of meadows where we cut grass and made hay for horses. The village is located on a very high river bank about 30 meters high. The meadows are located on the opposite side of the river, they are floodplain meadows. In spring, we burnt out the old dry grass to give way to the new one to provide our horses with food and also to fertilize the soil. Though the fire risk in such places like floodplain meadows is very low, still we had special patrols which were controlling the whole burning process.
From all my childhood memories I can't remember a single case when such controlled burning could turn into fire. Now that I live in the city and many people moved into the cities, many of those meadows became abandoned. No one takes care of them starting from the ‘90s of the last century, when collective farms fell apart. Now these lands are privately owned, but they were purchased as assets, not with the purpose of using them for agriculture. Now, those lands are treated as property and there is grass growing on those meadows. It is forbidden by law to burn that grass and so there are just tons of dry grass and no one takes care of it. That's why any match or cigarette stub thrown out of a passing car or glass laying on the ground can start a fire. The most dangerous period of time is when the snow has already melted, the old grass has become dry, but new grass hasn't appeared yet."
Jessica Cook: But these cultural burns, once an integral tool to manage healthy lands and an important cultural practice passed down for generations, have since, in essence, been banned through colonization. In Canada for example, in much of the 20th century, burning was outlawed and replaced with a centralized system with a goal to suppress all forest fires.
But decades of fire suppression throughout North America made an impact. While suppression can be a successful tactic, its widespread enforcement has caused ecological damage. For example, suppressing fires has led to an accumulation of wildfire fuel, and as a result, this fuel now feeds bigger and more intense wildfires that release even more carbon into the atmosphere. There are also some issues with forest health. For example, without cultural burns, mountain pine beetle infestations have created huge swaths of dead trees, which help to fuel massive wildfires.
The banning of cultural burns has also had a major cultural impact on Indigenous Peoples, as fire knowledge could no longer be practiced and passed down to younger generations. And this goes beyond burning the land. In our conversation, Edward Alexander mentioned that even practices like making sustainable caribou fences, where fire would be used to treat the wood to make it last longer, has been lost.
Edward Alexander: When we're told we can't do cultural burning, when we're discouraged from this practice, I view it as something that doesn't just harm Gwich’in of now, but it harms us as we go forward and we build relationships with each other and harms the development of our people, because the development of our people is in relationship to our land, right? It's in relationship to each other as relationship to our past, relationship to our ancestors, caretaking things for the future. And so cultural burning to me is a real nexus point of how we care for each other and how we care for the animals around us. And, there's one way that we can prevent the world from being destroyed, but also prevent the memory of our ancestors from being destroyed. Prevent our relationships from being destroyed. And so, to me, and I think to many Gwich’in, we feel empowered by cultural burning. We feel empowered by Dinju Zhuh Kʼyuu, our language, our way of life. And so, if we're going to have a revitalization of Gwich’in culture, our language, of our way of life, it must necessarily include our traditional practices, our Indigenous practices around fire.
Jessica Cook: Around the 1970s and 80s, there was a radical shift in policy from obsessively suppressing fires to the other side of the pendulum: let-burn policies. The let-burn strategy allowed wildfires to burn uncontrolled in state designated, so-called wilderness areas.
Edward Alexander: You know, those are the kinds of swings that we've seen and the policies that we've been subject, you know, subjected to. But traditionally Gwich’in didn't have a suppression strategy for fire, and nor did we have a let it burn policy for fire.
Jessica Cook: With the increase in climate change-induced wildfires, the need for fire as a management tool is becoming more understood and accepted. Across North America, fire practices have been changing over the past years – but these shouldn’t be mistaken for Indigenous cultural burning practices.
So-called prescribed fires are executed by government forest managers with a primary goal of getting rid of built-up fuel such as needles, grass, fallen branches and downed trees to reduce uncontrolled wildfires. Cultural burns, on the other hand, are done to fortify the land, promoting the growth of medicinal and food plants and maintaining the landscape for species, with the reduction of wildfire fuel as just one of the benefits.
In a world of more frequent and intense wildfires, it’s time to re-think fire management.
Edward Alexander: So, can cultural burning practices play a part in limiting the severity of these fires in the North? For sure they can. And it can have a profound impact, I feel, on global climate change and how quickly, you know, these forests are changing. And we've already seen a change in our homeland, you know, so I'm kind of speaking from the future. Gwich'in have already lived through this. It’s not for our own benefit that we're we're saying this here. Our homelands already burned. 65% of Gwich’in home land where I'm from has burned in my lifetime.
Jessica Cook: Indigenous Peoples’ cultural burning practices are gaining more awareness in Western science. Sue Natali speaks about the value of working across knowledge systems.
Sue Natali: I think, when I work with Indigenous Knowledge Holders, there's a much more holistic way of thinking and understanding the system. How fire impacts the whole system: wildlife, carbon, you know, waterways, transportation, cultural practices – that’s something that I don't know. And that's something that I learn a lot from, from colleagues who are Indigenous Knowledge Holders, who do understand the system, who have grown up on the land and grown up with, you know, learning this from parents and grandparents and great grandparents. And so I think that's really important. And I think it's also really important in terms of the solution space. So, you know, the Western way of managing lands, have, are not always aligned with best practices for protecting those lands. And Indigenous Peoples have lived on the land for very long time, and traditional and Indigenous fire practices, is one area where I think we should really look to in terms of thinking about how do we protect these lands and how do we manage these lands in such a way that people, animals, you know, wildlife can sort of live in one space and not be extractive of that space.
Jessica Cook: This isn’t to say that fire management practices of the past decades are good for nothing. Fire suppression can save lives and properties. And in vulnerable permafrost areas, for example, can help delay permafrost thaw. But it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. And unique conditions in the Arctic may call for unique solutions.
One of the experts working with federal agencies to find more holistic ways of addressing fires in the Arctic, especially in permafrost rich regions, is Brenden Rogers, who we heard from briefly at the top of the episode.
Brendan Rogers: So currently, fire management does not consider carbon, does not consider permafrost. And in large part doesn't consider smoke transport and human health either. So we've been doing a lot of work trying to rethink about, you know, trying to rethink what fire management could consider in an era of climate change and evolving needs and priorities.
So we've done some work to characterize the problem and characterize how fire management could in some instances keep carbon in the ground, keep permafrost intact. And I do think it can be part of the solution space when we think about climate change, natural climate solutions, impacts on communities. And right now it's currently not part of most fire management frameworks, but I believe that it could be integrated.
Jessica Cook: Brenden mentions a specific pilot project in Edward Alexander’s homelands.
Brendan Rogers: So what I can point you to is a case study that's happening right now in interior Alaska, in the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge. This is being led by folks at the Fish and Wildlife Service, where for the first time, they're using fire management, in this case targeted fire suppression, after fires are ignited to preserve carbon and preserve permafrost and a specific kind of permafrost that has a lot of carbon has a lot of ice called yedoma.
But I should mention that this pilot project, this decision is not purely about carbon. That's what largely motivated it, but there are communities, mostly Alaska Native communities in the region, that have been experiencing more and more smoke that's disrupting aviation, disrupting Indigenous subsistence activities. And so this is all taken into account in with that decision, including the loss of old growth habitat.
Jessica Cook: Fire suppression, Brenden points out, is not the only fire management technique.
Brendan Rogers: There's also, you know, fuels treatments which is especially important around communities, prescribed burning and really importantly, cultural burning, which has been essentially, suppressed. And, rights have been suppressed around cultural burning throughout the northern regions. But it was a really important part of Indigenous communities, and a really important part of the landscape pre-colonial times. And so restoring rights for cultural burning, I think, has a large role to play. So I think it's a convergence of values, not only carbon and climate, but also what's happening in terms of smoke, human health, Indigenous sovereignty. And we also need to consider all the tools at our disposal, not just fire suppression, but fuels management, prescribed fire, and importantly, restoring rights for cultural burning.
Jessica Cook: While there has been a renewed interest in prescribed burning and cultural burning, Indigenous Peoples still face barriers. These include misconceptions about cultural burning, fire management laws, permit requirements and lack of training, capacity and funding. But the revival of Indigenous fire practices combined with modern wildland fire governance could be a bridge to assist society with learning to live with increasing fires.
To do this, coordination across borders and disciplines is essential, and Arctic communities that are the first to experience these changes must be empowered to lead and contribute. These are the types of efforts that the Arctic Council is uniquely placed to facilitate. Its structure provides the platform for cooperation amongst governments, Indigenous Peoples, scientists and Knowledge Holders.
Decolonizing wildland fire management is a big step forward in proceeding through a world where the Arctic is on fire. Yet, given all we’ve heard about Arctic wildfires and the tremendous impact on our world, it can be hard, I mean I find personally, that it’s difficult to not get trapped in this thought pattern of climate doom. But there is reason to have hope. And there is so much reason to continue advocating for action.
Sue Natali: So I just I guess it's really important to not feel like, you know, it's out of our hands and we're doomed because we're not, like, every bit, every single action that we take. It's an interconnected world and greenhouse gases are globally mixed. So every action that we take, no matter where we are, will both help to protect the Arctic and then in turn, feedback to people elsewhere on the planet.
Edward Alexander: I think, that, as people and as states, and as Indigenous Peoples that we all share our knowledge and we all come together to have a clear direction around what's going on with wildland fire in the Arctic. You know, before, the impacts are so vast that it affects the entire globe.
You know, the scope and size of this challenge will require like, a sort of, much more cooperation and much more kindness to each other. Much more understanding of each other, much more understanding of the issue than we've seen so far. But I feel that people can get there, you know. I think we can get there.
Jessica Cook: It's reassuring to hear that Edward, who has been at the forefront of raising this issue on the Arctic Council’s agenda, has hope for the future.
Rosa-Máren Magga: Yes, I agree with that. The wildland fires have been a focus of the Arctic Council for some time, and the Norwegian Chairship of the Arctic Council elevated this issue by launching a Wildland Fire Initiative from 2023-2025. After having this focus, what are your takeaways on this, Jess?
Jessica Cook: Well, before speaking with Ed and Chief Bill, I had no idea about the cultural, let alone ecological benefits of fire. And it really re-shaped my thinking. About fire but also about Indigenous knowledge and the need for these knowledge systems to come together to tackle such a huge issue. What would you say is your biggest takeaway, Rosa-Máren?
Rosa-Máren Magga: Hearing these experiences and stories, for example the evacuations in many communities, clearly the Arctic wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of the wildfires back in 2023. I hope by having lifted this work on the Arctic Council agenda, and therefore increasing the cooperation in the Arctic, the whole Arctic will be better prepared to respond to the future fire seasons.
Ending Credits:
Thanks for listening to This Way Up from the Arctic Council Secretariat and Indigenous Peoples Secretariat. This episode was hosted by Jessica Cook and Rosa-Máren Magga. It was developed and written by Jessica Cook, Kristina Bär, Rosa-Máren Magga and Minetta Westerlund. The music in this episode is by Emil Kárlsen. Sound design by Både Og studios.
Thanks so much to our guests Edward Alexander of Gwich’in Council International, Chief Bill Erasmus of the Arctic Athabaskan Council, Vladimir Klimov of RAIPON and Sue Natali and Brenden Rogers of the Woodwell Climate Research Center
We also would like to thank David Natcher and Karin Nutti Pilflykt. They provided their insights to this episode.
The views expressed in this episode do not reflect those of the Arctic States and Permanent Participants.
A full list of sources and references can be found on our website: arctic-council.org