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Faced with dramatic shifts in the Arctic due to joint pressures of climate change and industrial development, a trio of Canadian NGOs released Monday an educational tool they hope will help shape the conversation about protecting the region’s fragile environment and its Indigenous peoples.

The 122-page trilingual – English, French and Inuktitut – Canada’s Arctic Marine Atlas released by Oceans North, Ducks Unlimited Canada and World Wildlife Fund- Canada provides a comprehensive overview of complex interactions between humans and various Arctic marine species.

A G7 ministers meeting in Halifax will promote the Canadian-led oceans plastic charter, with Ottawa planning to take the accord to the United Nations General Assembly, says the federal environment minister.

The non-binding accord was agreed-to by five of the G7 leaders and the European Union at the G7’s Charlevoix summit in June, though neither the United States nor Japan have signed on yet.

A vast array of scientific knowledge about Canada’s Arctic has been compiled by three of the country’s largest environmental organizations into an electronic document that tracks the story of humans, animals and marine ecosystems across the Far North.

Canada’s Arctic Marine Atlas, more than three years in the making, was released on Monday – two days before Group of Seven environment ministers are scheduled to meet in Halifax to discuss oceans, clean energy, global climate action and fisheries.

Canada will use its presidency of the G7 to try to persuade the world’s richest and most industrialized countries to adopt ambitious goals for plastics recycling and waste reduction.

“We are looking at a zero-plastics-waste charter,” Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said Wednesday from Cancun, Mexico, where she was at an international conference on the world’s oceans.

The Disko Fan and the Funk Island Deep. Most Canadians might be excused for thinking they could be the names of pop-rock bands.

They are, in fact, the monikers of two of Canada’s newest marine refuges where the federal government hopes to protect sensitive ocean habitats in the Eastern Arctic.

Fisheries Minister Dominic LeBlanc announced the creation of seven new marine refuges Thursday, adding more than 145,000 square kilometres to the ocean areas along Canada’s coasts that are deemed off limits to fishing gear that makes contact with the ocean floor.

Nine nations and the European Union have reached a deal to place the central Arctic Ocean (CAO) off-limits to commercial fishers for at least the next 16 years. The pact, announced yesterday, will give scientists time to understand the region’s marine ecology—and the potential impacts of climate change—before fishing becomes widespread.

“There is no other high seas area where we’ve decided to do the science first,” says Scott Highleyman, vice-president of conservation policy and programs at the Ocean Conservancy in Washington, D.C., who also served on the U.S. delegation to the negotiations. “It’s a great example of putting the precautionary principle into action.”

The Inuit of the western edge of Greenland call the tip of Baffin Bay that lies between them and their distant relatives in Canada the Pikialasorsuaq, or “the great upwelling,” because the water is open all year round and teems with the wildlife that has been the staple of their diet for thousands of years.

Along the northern edge of the Pikialasorsuaq is an ice bridge that was the migration route from North America taken centuries ago by the ancestors of the Inuit who now live along Greenland’s coast.

The Inuit of Labrador and the federal government have signed a deal that will see the Inuit use their traditional knowledge to develop a marine-management plan covering more than 380,000 square kilometres of coastal waters on the far eastern end of the Northwest Passage.

The plan, which is expected to govern shipping, resource extraction, water quality, species management, conservation of historical sites and other matters of importance to the Inuit, comes as climate change and the decline of Arctic sea ice are opening the passage to an increasing amount of ship traffic.

The federal government has reached an agreement with local Inuit that will lead to the protection and management of a massive swath of northern sea in one of the most ecologically sensitive regions of the Canadian Arctic.

The new proposed boundaries of a national marine conservation area in Lancaster Sound, which has sometimes been called the Serengeti of the Arctic because of the breadth of its biodiversity, would encompass more than 131,000 square kilometres of ocean.