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

Inuit in the Upernavik district of Northern Greenland has in generations used the winter sea ice as the basis for the essential hunting of seals, white- and narwhales. Since the late 1980’ies hunting has been combined with increasing fishery of Greenland halibut during summer from dinghies and in the winter from the sea ice serving the subsistence of 400 families.

These living conditions are now under heavy pressures from a set of interacting rapid changes in the natural environment and socio-economic institutions resulting from climate changes, modernization and globalization, where the Greenlandic government intent to allocate a larger part of the halibut quota to larger vessels not located in the district and at the same time reduce quota for dinghy and dog sledge based fishing due to limited or even misleading data of the local subsistence and money economy.