On this website, you will encounter a few different important terms. In order to facilitate your understanding, we have identified them below:
- Permafrost and Permafrost Thaw: Permafrost is soil that is permanently frozen. As Earth’s climate warms, this permanently frozen soil will melt, or thaw, leaving behind soil that is very unstable.
- Climate Forced Relocation: Results from climate-caused changes to a community’s environment that severely impacts infrastructure as well as the livelihood and well-being of the residents. Relocation occurs because the location of the community is no longer sustainable due to massive changes in the environment around it—including available land, wildlife distribution, and more.
- Food Security (UN FAO definition): “A situation that exists when people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.”
- Food Security (ICC definition): “Inuit food security is the natural right of all Inuit to be part of the ecosystem, to access food and to care-take, protect and respect all of life, land, water and air.”
- Housing Insecurity: The experience of households which lack secure access to high-quality housing due to a range of challenges including high costs, overcrowding, and poor health or safety conditions.
- Indigenous Knowledge: Indigenous knowledge, or traditional knowledge, is a body of knowledge that Indigenous people have built up over generations, often as a result of living in close contact with nature, that is recorded orally.
- Knowledge Sharing: Knowledge sharing is the process in which information and expertise is exchanged between and among people and communities. For our context, this is information exchanged between Indigenous communities and non-indigenous, or western communities.