Hunting and fishing settlements in Upernavik district of Northern Greenland – challenged by climate, centralization, and globalization

Inuit from the Upernavik district of Northern Greenland have, for generations, used winter sea ice as the basis for essential hunting of seals, white whales, and narwhales. For the continued subsistence survival of 400 families since the late 1980s, hunting has been combined with increasing fishing of Greenland halibut during the summer from dinghies and in the winter from the sea ice. However, subsistence living conditions are now under intense pressure from a set of rapid, interacting changes in the natural environment and socioeconomic institutions resulting from climate changes, modernization, and globalization. Specifically, Greenland's Government intends to allocate a greater portion of the halibut quota to larger vessels outside the Upernavik district and simultaneously reduce the quota for dinghy and dog-sledge fishing due to limited or even misleading data regarding local subsistence and the cash economy.