In taking action on climate, this Arctic community wants to be a beacon to the world

Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This story is part of a CBC News initiative entitled Our Changing Planet to show and explain the effects of climate change and what is being done about it.

In Old Crow, the Yukon's northernmost community, some freezers still hum, even in late October.

That's odd. Typically, the appliances, which sit on porches, are plugged in during the summer but unplugged when it gets colder, as the frigid air does the work of refrigeration, averting the need to rely on expensive electricity. 

The problem is, it isn't sufficiently cold yet. 

When an Old Crow resident tells this story around a fire at a mountainside camp, the Vuntut Gwitchen elders standing nearby nod. They know all about the freezer situation.

There is snow everywhere here, 130 kilometres above the Arctic Circle, but by their standards, not much. It's cold, but not cold enough. 

WATCH | How Old Crow is dealing with climate change:

The Porcupine caribou they rely on to hunt have returned, but the herd is late and there don't seem to be many of them in the area right now. It's not at all like those years when the mountains looked alive, there were so many caribou up there. 

The caribou that have recently shown up dig through the snow for the nutritious lichen they crave and find some of it trapped under ice. This isn't good. The ice only forms because the weather has been warm enough for rain or wet snow, which eventually freezes. Snowfalls pile on top, but that ice has done damage by locking the lichen in.

Of course the caribou can get through it with their snouts and hooves, but it takes energy they are trying to conserve. The hunters and elders in the area figure the caribou might move on to more fruitful feeding grounds.

This is the reality of the North in a changing climate. The Arctic is warming at a rate of two to three times the rest of the world, and while the signs of it may seem invisible to an outsider, they are disturbingly clear if you call Old Crow home.

Seventy-five-year-old Elizabeth Kaye lives here and says it is deeply changed.

"I am excited to know that the caribou is here, but that excitement also changed for me because I waited so long and I should have already been done working with the caribou, all stored away and moving onto the next [task], which for me is ice fishing. 

"But I can't go. The ice is not safe to go on. Way back, I used to go ice fishing in October. And here I am, still waiting."