ABSTRACT. - Le changement climatique dans le Grand Nord Canadien: risques et impacts sur la biodiversité arctique et les sociétés Inuites. The global climate is currently changing, at a rhythm never seen before. These changes are felt particularly intensely in the Arctic region, where the mean temperatures increase twice as fast as the rest of the globe, and where melting of the glaciers and the permafrost indicate the huge changes still to come. The impacts on the environment are visible, sometimes even from the space such as the reduction of the pack ice surface of the Arctic Ocean. Although being a remote region, the Arctic is not a region isolated of the rest of the planet and the changes that it undergoes currently will have impacts for the global climatic system. Indeed, the Arctic, as well as the Antarctica, acts like a regulating element of temperature, cooling and controlling the global warming. If the mechanisms of cooling are disrupted by climatic changes and cannot anymore complete their functions, the global temperatures will increase again and more quickly. In addition, to causing a number of ecological, social and economic impacts for the rest of the globe, the climate change in the Arctic has another major impact, namely to disrupt completely the traditional livelihoods and the culture of several indigenous communities. The peoples of the Great North, and among them the 150.000 Inuits, distributed in Tchoukotka, Alaska, Canada and in Greenland, are directly affected by the environmental changes. It is therefore important to know the risks and the impacts caused by climate change in the Arctic in order to understand the consequences that they will generate. Taking the example of the Great Canadian North, this article characterizes and analyses the risks and the impacts of climate change on the arctic biodiversity and on the Inuit societies.
Key-words: climatic changes, risk, environment, biodiversity, impact