Certainly. I'll speak about polar bears for a moment.
For the past eight years, I've been engaged in a study working together with local hunters' and trappers' organizations based in Nunavut to collaboratively sit down to speak about the expertise that Inuit polar bear hunters have and that women specialized in polar bear hide cleaning have to write this knowledge down and to assess polar bear health using metrics and indicators that are used by hunters on the land, such as looking at polar bear bodies' condition, how many bears there are, how fat or how skinny they are, etc. At the end of the day, we write down all this evidence and we submit it to decision-makers and policy-makers who will establish, for example, polar bear harvesting quotas based on indigenous knowledge, based on the evidence we gathered through the study and based on western science as well.
As Patrice mentioned, under comprehensive land claims agreement areas up north, you have co-management systems whereby it is a mandated responsibility, mandated legislatively, to have indigenous knowledge and western science both included in the decision-making process, so that's where research supports the process.
I think this is a great model of how resources are invested to support the building of evidence from both sides. I think a key to the future of this approach is really to invest in capacity, as we are doing right now within ECCC with the indigenous science division. For a long time, western sciences have had a lot of voice, and I think it is imperative nowadays that indigenous sciences and knowledge systems have equally powerful voices in the research realm and in the policy realm.