Inuit Circumpolar Council Calls for Tribal Consultation. When it comes to relationships between the federal government and Alaska Native people, conversations need to start at the beginning. That's a message that's been repeated time and time again in recent years from a host of Native groups, corporations, and organizations. In its current newsletter, Inuit Circumpolar Council-Alaska called for the same notion of equality in decision-making by way of consultation. The Arctic Sounder

 

Scientists Create New Model to Map Warming-Related Threats. Global warming could reshuffle forests in North America as southern species move north, and now scientists have create a model to map out the changes. Subtropical species could colonize the forests of the Cascade Mountain range on the United States-Canada border. The U.S. Gulf Coast's woodlands could start looking more like Cuba, and Texas like the hot, dry forests in Mexico. The Pacific Northwest could start looking like southeastern China or sub-Saharan Africa. E&E News

 

Pentagon Already Preparing for Sea-Level Rise. More than 1,170 American coastal military installations worldwide may grapple with sea-level rise, and a new Pentagon report gives local planners the most detailed projections yet. The Department of Defense has previously recognized the risks of increased flooding and storm surges to its installations due to climate change. The latest report and online database, released late last month, is a technical analysis targeted at planners. But the document also represents the most significant interagency effort to assess coastal vulnerability of military installations to date. E&E News

 

Sustaining Arctic Observing Networks Review Survey. The process for developing the Sustaining Arctic Observing Networks (SAON) was initiated by the Arctic Council and has been underway since early 2007. It was formally established following a decision of the Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in 2011. The SAON Board has established an External Review Committee to conduct an external review of SAON. The plan for the review states that the Committee should organise a survey among Arctic stakeholders. The survey will be conducted using two different versions: a general version for those less familiar with the inner workings of SAON, and a version that also asks about internal processes and structures of SAON. The outcomes of the survey will be used to inform the External Review Committee's deliberations and be part of the report that the External Review Committee delivers to the SAON Board in 2016. To take the survey, please see here.

 

Rare Seal Pups Stranded on Shrinking Arctic Ice. Mikhail Verevkin points his spyglass toward the Gulf of Finland and squints into the distance. "One, two, three. ..." He counts 19 animals lounging on rocks before looking up. They are all gray seals. The Baltic ringed seal is nowhere to be found. It's April 20, the time of year when seal scientists like Verevkin, who works for the Russian Academy of Sciences, fly over the Baltic Sea to count numbers of the Baltic ringed seal, a marine mammal that, unlike the gray seal, is totally dependent on sea ice for raising pups. National Geographic

Greenlanders Getting a Little Healthier. Greenlandic Inuits, the country's native people, experience many of the same health and social issues as other indigenous peoples like the Aborigines in Australia and Sami in Sweden and 5,000 other indigenous populations listed by the UN around the world. A new study by a scientific journal, the Lancet, has collected information on the health and social conditions of 28 of those indigenous groups' health and social conditions. The welfare of the natural population is compared to that of the colonial power that took control of their countries: Greenlanders are compared to Danes, Aboriginals to Australians and the Canadian Inuit to Canadians. The Copenhagen Post