Land, coastline and freshwater are integral to Inuit survival. Most Inuit Nunangat communities are located on the coast for transportation and for access to marine wildlife and plants including whales, seal, fish, shellfish and kelp. Being on the land is a core part of Inuit cultural practices, hunting and survival, art and music, knowledge transfer, and environmental stewardship. And our freshwater sustains communities and the Arctic’s fragile, evolving ecosystem.
In 2021, ITK began to examine the land and coastline of Inuit Nunangat to see how much space we occupy within Canada. It’s more than we thought.
Inuit Nunangat includes the four Inuit land claim regions: the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the western Arctic, Nunavut, Nunavik in northern Quebec, and Nunatsiavut in Labrador. In the past, we have said our homeland comprises roughly one third of Canada’s land area and two thirds of its coastline. But applying the Government of Canada’s map scale, and official geographic datasets, ITK researchers determined that Inuit Nunangat actually makes up about 40% of Canada’s land area and 72% of its coastline.
So what changed? The answer lies in the details. Consider part of the Nunatsiavut coastline at right, in low resolution 5M (green) and higher resolution 1M (black). At the 1M resolution – which is roughly equivalent to what Canada uses to calculate its coastline – offshore islands appear and our coastline gets more detailed, and longer.
So using Canada’s map scale, we have concluded:
Inuit Nunangat comprises roughly 40% of Canada’s land area and 72% of its coastline.
These figures were derived using the Government of Canada’s CANVEC series dataset and input from Inuit land claim organizations. For a detailed explanation, please refer to our methodology report: Inuit Nunangat Coastline Length and Land Area Calculations.
In 2024, ITK continued our geographic research of Inuit Nunangat by looking at freshwater in our traditional homelands. With newly acquired data calculated by Natural Resources Canada and its Center for Remote Sensing, and in collaboration with Dr. Shusen Wang, we were able to monitor the evolution of water coverage, quantity and flow over the past 30 years through satellite sensing.
Using this data, we estimate that 35.18% of all surface water in Canada is located within Inuit Nunangat, encompassing 312,982 square kilometres of Canada’s 889,636 square kilometres of water-covered area.
Globally, Canada is home to approximately 20% of the world’s surface freshwater (Statistics Canada, 2018). This means Inuit Nunangat contains about 7.2% of the world’s surface freshwater — a remarkable and globally significant figure.
