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The Canadian Arctic is uniquely sensitive to climate change impacts, including rapidly warming temperatures, sea ice change, and permafrost degradation. Adaptation-including efforts to manage climate change risks, reduce damages, and take advantage of new opportunities-has been identified as a priority for policy action across government levels. However, our understanding of adaptation in the Canadian North is limited: Is adaptation taking place, to what stresses, and what does it look like? In this paper we answer these questions for the Inuit territory of Nunavut, systematically cataloguing and reviewing government-led adaptation programs and policies at community, territorial, and federal levels, drawing on publically available information. We documented a total of 700 discrete adaptation initiatives. The focus on adaptation to-date has primarily been at the groundwork level, aimed at informing and preparing for adaptation through impact assessments, adaptation planning exercises, and stakeholder engagement. Adaptation in Nunavut has been driven by cross-scale coordination and leadership from the territorial and federal government. Our study finds few examples of concrete actions for planned adaptation, such as changes to or creation of policies that enable adaptation, alterations to building codes and infrastructure design with changing geo-hazards, or enhanced disaster planning and emergency preparedness in light of projected impacts. This study indicates a need for formal adaptation plans for the Governments of Canada and Nunavut, emphasis on adaptation monitoring and evaluation, and a greater role of Inuit traditional knowledge and cultural values in adaptation policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adaptation refers both to a process and its outcome, leading to much interpretation and debate. The origin of this semantic duality is related to the epistemological rupture occurred during the 19th Century from the collision between an emerging Theory of Evolution and the established Creationism. The temporal scale of Evolution is an abstract concept outside the realm of immediate human perception which makes the adaptation debate more complex. Though, adaptation became a central concept in several major disciplines of social as psychology, anthropology or geography as well as many fields of biology. In each discipline, environment is strongly linked to the concept of adaptation. Environmental sciences are in the intersection of natural and social sciences and have a strong interdisciplinary feature as adaptation does. That's why, because of the acceleration of global environmental and socioeconomic change, there is a growing interest in adaptation in the environmental science. Climate change is one of the major topics concerned by adaptation, since the theme became a priority in research and politic agenda. But implementation of adaptation to climate change faces to barriers, in particular due to its unclear definition. The objective of this paper is to contribute to greater understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of the concept of adaptation in the climate change through a comprehensive and interdisciplinary review of the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]