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WATER POLITICS

Via Yale e360, a look at how – with the Mackenzie River too low for barge traffic – villages in the Northwest Territories are flying in food, fuel, and other essentials. A proposed highway could offer a lifeline as climate change further reduces flows, but the project faces big challenges in a warming Arctic.

In the summer of 2001, I kayaked solo for 66 days down the Nahanni, Liard, and Mackenzie rivers in Canada’s Northwest Territories. I saw few signs of human life on the wild Nahanni and the muddy Liard. But once I got to the Mackenzie, which is part of the second longest river system on the continent, I had to make way for tugboats pulling giant barges filled with gas, heating fuel, dry food, and other supplies destined for roadless Indigenous communities downstream of the village of Wrigley, where the Mackenzie Highway, which begins in Alberta, ends. More than once on a cold misty night, I was awoken in my tent by the deafening blast of a tug’s horn.

Nowadays, those horn blasts are far less frequent because the Mackenzie River, which flows northwest to the Arctic Ocean and is part of the second longest river system on the continent, is at times not deep enough to float those barges. In fact, the government-owned company that operates the tugs stopped service altogether this year when it became clear the river would not contain sufficient water — even in late spring, after river ice melted. In June, the Canadian Coast Guard announced its services, including the provision of on-the-water responses and maintenance of aids to navigation, were “impacted” for almost a thousand miles of river.

With fresh and dried food, essential building supplies, and fuel now being flown in by plane, and prices skyrocketing, residents in the five communities in the Sahtu region are ramping up their demand for the Canadian government to build a $1 billion (Canadian) road and bridge — known as the Mackenzie Valley Highway project — that will serve as a lifeline and connect them with other communities and services in the south. Many are currently rationing fuel and bringing in food from the south while vacationing or undergoing medical exams and treatment.

The Mackenize River has never been so low, and all signs suggest climate change will make the situation much worse.
During earlier periods of low water, supplies were trucked north thousands of miles from the south along the Alaksa and Dempster highways, then barged in from the Arctic Ocean on the Mackenzie. But this workaround has never happened with water so low for so long, and all signs suggest climate change will make the situation much worse.

“The big issue for people living up here is what is next year — and the years after that — going to bring as the climate continues to warm and dry out the river?” says Todd McCauley, who is leading the campaign for the road that his mother, a Dene Indigenous chief, advocated for many years ago.

“If you look at the bay on the Mackenzie where the barges [from the Arctic Ocean] dock at Norman Wells, there’s no water. It’s nothing but mud.”

“For a very long time, the North has been viewed as a source of resources — beaver, furs, timber, metals, oil and gas — all to be developed by southern companies, financed by southern banks, for the benefit of distant southern markets,” says Charles McNeely, a Fort Good Hope resident who is chairman of the Dene- and Metis-run Sahtu Secretariat, which is responsible for implementing a range of services for the region’s five communities.

“In exchange for this, the North got dispossessed of our lands and resources, our families torn apart [by the residential school program], our culture and language discredited, and our children abused. Not exactly a fair exchange, was it? How about we try something different for a change?”

Increasingly hot, dry weather, diminishing winter snowpack, and rapidly melting icefields have been reducing mid- to later-summer flows along most of the continent’s Arctic rivers for many years. While I was boating down the Alaska side of the Yukon River with retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist Skip Ambrose this past June, he told me that he had never seen such low river levels over the 50 years he’s been surveying peregrine falcon nest sites there. The Great Slave Lake, the fifth largest lake in North America, which drains into the Mackenzie River, is also at a record low.

But people living along the Yukon and Mackenzie rivers aren’t only dealing with the stresses of low water. High water levels, the result of melting far earlier in the year, are also causing disruptions. In 2021, flooding in the Hay, Mackenzie, and Little Buffalo river systems caused $40 million in damages. In 2023, rising water levels along the Yukon River at Eagle, Alaska, poured onto the streets and into a hotel.

University of Saskatchewan water expert John Pomeroy suggests that northerners should brace themselves for the bigger rainstorms that climate change is bringing. Climate change is also accelerating the recession of glaciers and thawing permafrost and snowpacks earlier and in shorter bursts.

“What we expect to see is much higher and earlier flows, higher flood peaks, and less water flowing in the hot days of summer,” he says, warning of severe consequences for water resources management and navigation.

Conservationists worry that saying yes to the road will bolster the claims of other interests lobbying for roads in the Arctic.
Pomeroy’s observation has been echoed by other studies, including one that recently calculated the stream flow in 486,493 pan-Arctic river reaches from 1984 to 2018. The scientists found significant changes in the rate and timing of river discharges during the spring melt of snow and ice and in summer stream intermittency.

Scientists at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst recently combined field observations and numerical modeling to determine how 8.7 million square miles of the Arctic are likely to change over the next 80 years. They suggest that by 2100 there will be 25 percent more runoff in the far north from subsurface pathways and more rainfall, but less water flowing in late spring and summer.

Yukon glaciers sliding out of the St. Elias icefield, among the most expansive in the world, have lost 22 percent of their surface area since 1958. The Brintnell Bologna Icefields in the Ragged Range of the Northwest Territories, which sends meltwater into the Mackenzie River system, are fading even faster.

For years, residents of the Sahtu have been demanding from the Canadian government a two-lane gravel highway of approximately 200 miles. The road was estimated to cost at least $700 million, and in 2018 the government allocated approximately $70 million to study its feasibility. But last February, Canada’s Environment Minister announced the government would no longer invest in major, new road construction. Money spent on asphalt and concrete, minister Steven Guilbeault said, would be “better invested into projects that will help fight climate change and adapt to its impacts.”

After a public outcry, Northwest Territory’s member of parliament, Michael McLeod, quickly clarified that the Mackenzie Valley Highway was still on the table, as did Guilbeault.

Still, conservationists worry that saying yes to the road will bolster the claims of other communities and mining interests that have been lobbying for roads in other regions of the Arctic. For example, mining companies and the Inuit in the Kitikmeot region of the central Arctic have pushed — unsuccessfully so far — for a port to be constructed along the Arctic coast with a road running from Bathurst Inlet to a complex of inland mines and mining exploration sites.

Earlier this year, Nunavut, Canada’s self-governing Inuit territory, hired an engineering company to study the potential for a 450-mile road that would connect four western Hudson Bay communities. A separate 200-mile route to the more remote inland community of Baker Lake is also under consideration. Neither of these roads, nor the Mackenzie Valley Highway, could be built without significant federal funding.

To understand why the federal government may be reluctant to fund Arctic roads, it’s helpful to understand the fate of other northern highways and what a rapidly warming Arctic will mean for such infrastructure.

The people of the Sahtu have invested more in conservation and carbon capture than has any jurisdiction in the south.
Opened to the public in 2017, the $300 million, 87-mile all-weather road from Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk in Northwest Territories was supposed to bring tourists to the Inuvialuit town of Tuktoyaktuk and lower the cost of energy development along the Arctic coast. But few tourists undertake the long, punishing drive, and the oil and gas companies pulled out of the region before the road was even completed. Today, Tuktoyaktuk is slowly sliding into the sea due to rising sea levels, powerful storms surges, and rapidly thawing permafrost.

Maintaining Arctic roads has also proved costly. Just a few years after the Inuvik to Tuk highway was completed, the government spent an additional $13.5 million to raise it in areas where permafrost had thawed. Climate-related maintenance costs for the Yukon’s highway network have risen by $169,000 per year, in constant 2021 dollars, since 1994.

The Mackenzie Valley Highway is not likely to cause as many headaches, according to University of Alberta scientist Duane Froese, who has been conducting permafrost research in the Sahtu region for the past few years

“There’s less permafrost and less ice-rich permafrost in comparison to the Inuvik to Tuk Highway,” he says. “Much of the route is along till plains that are unlikely in that region to host significant ground ice.”

Conservation groups have been silent on this issue for a few reasons. First, the right-of-way for the Mackenzie road does not pass through critical wildlife corridors, as the Bathurst Inlet road would. Second, they don’t want to jeopardize their relationship with people of the western Arctic, as there is still much wilderness to protect there, and they need the Dene on their side as partners, as the Dene own and have rights to vast areas of land.

The people of the Sahtu have already invested more in conservation and carbon capture than has any jurisdiction in the south. They agreed to allow a new national park — Nááts’ihch’oh — established on their territory. And organizations such as the Boreal Songbird Initiative and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society have praised them for recently agreeing to protect 4,000 square miles of carbon-rich wetlands along the Ramparts River near Fort Good Hope.

The Sahtu hope that the road will make it easier and cheaper to receive essential goods. But they also foresee economic opportunity, hoping that tourists, climbers, hikers, and paddlers travel to the new park and the region’s pristine mountain and tundra rivers.

Road proponents like McCauley point to other reasons for building. A road would make it easier to clean up the piles of scrap metals, broken down vehicles, leaking batteries, and other toxic materials from mining and other development activity that have been accumulating in Indigenous communities along the Mackenzie, and in Inuit communities on the Arctic islands, for decades.

“The first two roads” — the Dempster Highway and the Inuvik to Tuk road — “were built to take resources out of the North,” says McNeely, of the Sahtu Secretariat. The next one, which McNeely will call the Trudeau Road if the current prime minister approves it, “would bring the world into the North.”