Banner Photo: Faith Rahman

Identifying key sustainability considerations for Indigenous community-based weather monitoring networks across northern and remote regions

2025 – 2027

Funded by: Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada

Photos: Faith Rahman, Timothy Browne, Derek Mueller

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In Canada, weather services have been developed according to southern standards and priorities. Currently, national weather services are not meeting the needs of Inuit and other Indigenous and northern users. As a result, northern regions are gravely underserviced in terms of weather observations and infrastructure to inform forecasting services.

Indigenous communities across northern and remote regions have established their own community-based monitoring (CBM) programs to fill monitoring gaps and address travel safety concerns. These programs are leading innovations in blending Indigenous and western science to tailor weather, water, ice, and climate services to meet local needs.

Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC) funds the Indigenous Community-Based Climate Monitoring Program (ICBCMP), supporting Indigenous-led environmental monitoring across the country. In discussions with several ICBCMP leads, we learned there is interest in exploring how a regional approach to Indigenous-led weather service delivery could help to connect community and national weather programs to better address northern priorities.

Through five years of research and consultations across the Canadian North, and based on our previous surveys from our project on Community Weather, Water, Ice Information Uses & Needs, northerners have identified critical needs for:

1. More weather stations in areas of community importance;
2. Improved regional coordination; and,
3. Securing reliable funding to support CBM over the long term.

The goal of this project is to identify key sustainability considerations across a range of Indigenous-led CBM programs, considering: infrastructure, capacity, costs, data management, funding, information sharing, and challenges. We want to learn from CBM network leads what it takes to keep monitoring programs going.

We invite CBM network leads to share their experiences in three different ways, through:

1. A survey to document basic information about what is involved in running your weather stations.
2. A spreadsheet will be shared after receiving your survey responses to request more details.
3. A follow-up interview to be able to provide more context, and expand on survey responses.

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