Inuit crash through ice to death as warming bites

BELIZE CITY, May 29 (Reuters) Global warming has made life more dangerous for Inuit hunters in the Arctic as they increasingly fall to their deaths through thinning ice sheets while pursuing seals and polar bears.

Delegates at a climate change conference in Belize said today that many Inuit had died in recent years because their snow mobiles and sleds crash through the ice during hunts.

''My people have been hunting on the ice for 5,000 years but now you risk death around every turn,'' said Nicodemus Illauq, from the Inuit town of Clyde River in Canada.

Patricia Cochran, the head of an international Inuit council, said every Inuit in Alaska knew someone who had died by falling through the ice and drowning, although exact figures were hard to come by.

A report by the UN climate panel in April said warming is happening faster in the Arctic than elsewhere. Dark ground or sea, once uncovered, soaks up far more heat than reflective ice or snow.

Arctic peoples and tropical islanders are trying to strengthen an unusual alliance at the May 27-30 Belize meeting by seeking ways to cope with melting ice and rising seas.

Inuit hunters and a Sami reindeer herder from Norway are among those meeting local community leaders and other experts from French Polynesia, Fiji and the Caribbean at the talks.

Scientists say both the Arctic and small, low-lying islands are among the most vulnerable to global warming, which is widely blamed on human use of fossil fuels.

The Belize meeting of 40 delegates, led by an Oslo-based climate research group among others, is the first of its kind since a ''Many Strong Voices'' plan for Arctic peoples and island states was launched at UN talks in Montreal in 2005.

Its goal is to draft a 5-year plan for the states most at risk to address rising sea levels, stronger and more frequent hurricanes and melting glaciers.

REUTERS CS SBA BST0604