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ABSTRACT. It is well recognized that climate change will have considerable impact on the physical landscapes of northern Canada. How these impacts will be transmitted to the level of human activity is not clear, but it needs to be understood by governments and other decision makers to help them identify and implement appropriate approaches to ameliorate the effects of climate change. Translating physical changes into human impacts is not a simple task; communities are not passive players that will respond to changes in the physical environment in easily predictable ways. While many prognoses about change are made on a large scale, human activity is highly localized, and impacts and responses will be conditioned by local geography and a range of endogenous factors, including demographic trends, economic complexity, and experience with "change" in a broad sense. More and more studies are yielding important information about community-level experience, both past and current, with environmental shifts in the North, but research effort by social scientists falls short of what is required to reduce the level of uncertainty, and it compares unfavourably with the physical sciences' dedication to the climate change problem. A pan-northern research effort, building on a long legacy of social science research in the North, would go some way towards translating the promise of change into probable community impacts.
Key words: climate change, community impact, land use, traditional knowledge, response, uncertainty
RESUME. Il est bien connu que le changement climatique va avoir un impact considerable sur le paysage physique du nord du Canada. La facon dont ces retombees vont se transmettre au niveau de l'activite humaine n'est pas claire, mais les gouvernements et d'autres decideurs doivent la comprendre afin de pouvoir cerner et mettre sur pied des approches visant a amortir ces retombees. Traduire des changements physiques en repercussions humaines releve plus que d'une simple tache; les communautes ne sont pas des intervenants passifs qui vont reagir au changement de leur milieu physique de facon nettement previsible. Si bien des pronostics au sujet du changement sont etablis sur une grande echelle, l'activite humaine, elle, est tres localisee, et les impacts et reactions seront conditionnes par la geographie locale et par une gamme de facteurs endogenes, y compris les tendances demographiques, la complexite economique et l'experience...