The National Indigenous Climate Compass (NICC)

A collaborative tool to empower Indigenous Communities s in visualizing how climate change hazards are affecting their traditional territories.

The National Indigenous Climate Compass (NICC): A collaborative tool to empower Indigenous Communities s in visualizing how climate change hazards are affecting their traditional territories.

The NICC is a collaborative tool co-led by the Center for Indigenous Community Infrastructure at the University of Ottawa, Indigenous Community Partners and IndigenousTech.ai.

This project's main goal is to bridge the gap between large-scale observation systems and local-scale concerns around climate change​. Through the NICC, various models will be developed, tested, and then used to convert climate variables, that have been identified as important by the communities themselves, into hazard maps (e.g., flood, fire, low crop yields).  These hazard maps will then be overlayed on vulnerable assets (houses, roads, agricultural lands) to generate risk maps that would ultimately be used for decision making.​

ECoHLab members Sonia D. Wesche and Iliana Loupessis will be pivotal in the community engagement aspect of the NICC. Sonia Wesche's 10+ year expertise in working with communities in the Northwest Territories (NWT), the Yukon, and Nunavut will guide the project to better understand local- and regional-scale vulnerability to environmental change. Her community-based research, which focuses on Indigenous knowledge and knowledge co-production, will be pivotal in ensuring that the NICC is built for and with the communities it aims to serve. Iliana Loupessis focuses her research on the intersection of climate change adaptation and the impact of digital tools on building community resilience. Through her work on the NICC, she will steer its development in ways that respect Indigenous traditions and ensure communities are directly benefiting from these collaborations.

Read more about the The National Indigenous Compass (NICC)