ABSTRACT
The interdisciplinary impact study of the Mackenzie River Basin is an attempt to produce an integrated regional assessment of scenarios of climatic warming for a large watershed in northern Canada. The regional focus has been used to attract scientific expertise and various stakeholders with local knowledge. The northern two-thirds is a mixture of single industry resource towns, government centers, and Native communities, some of which are not yet linked to all-season roads. These communities follow a traditional lifestyle of wild food harvesting, which is a largely nonwage economy. Mackenzie Basin Impact Study (MBIS) is attempting to produce an integrated regional assessment of global warming scenarios, as a way of identifying the indirect linkages between climate and regional policy concerns, such as land and water management. Horizontal integration must consider the challenge of reconciling differences in language, data, and perception. An example within MBIS is interjurisdictional differences in data collection networks.
