"Climate change is threatening our way of life," indigenous peoples from Russia, Scandinavia, Greenland, Canada and Alaska said in a draft petition to the UN conference in Montreal, which is seeking ways to curb rising temperatures.

"Every country has to ask if it's doing enough" to slow global warming, said Olav Mathis Eira, vice president of the Sami Council that represents reindeer herders in Scandinavia and Russia. "We're asking for action, not sympathy or money."

Melting ice is making it harder for hunters to track seals, whales or polar bears, undermining traditional livelihoods.

The indigenous peoples aim to submit a petition to the Montreal conference on Tuesday urging it to amend a UN convention to add the Arctic to areas particularly vulnerable to climate change.

The convention's list now includes low-lying islands, desert areas and developing countries with mountainous areas. Addition to the 1992 convention would win indigenous peoples more attention, and perhaps access to UN funds.

Ray Johnson of the Aleut International Association, for instance, would like cash to build a barrier to slow coastal erosion in Nelson Lagoon, an Alaskan settlement of 80 people.

HUMMINGBIRD

Most winters, ice prevents waves from battering the shore but the bay did not freeze last winter for the first time in memory. "Times have changed, the climate has changed," he said.

And people in Nikolski, one of the Aleutian island chain off Alaska, were stunned to see a hummingbird this year, he said.

"We see that the melting of the ice is accelerating," said Lene Holm of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, which says it represents about 155,000 people.

Holm, who lives in Greenland, said a group of Inuit hunting for narwhal, a type of whale with a spear-like tusk, recently narrowly escaped being killed by a freak wave apparently caused by a huge chunk of a glacier falling into the sea.

A report by 250 scientists last year said the Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe, threatening to melt polar ice in summers by 2100 and to drive polar bears towards extinction.

It linked the warming to a build-up of heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars. It said the Arctic was warming fastest because dark ground and water, once exposed, soaks up more heat than snow or ice.

In northern Russia, indigenous peoples fear a spread of insect-borne diseases. "Mosquitoes are a very big problem," said Irina Shafrannik, president of the Association of indigenous peoples of Kolta-Kup region north of Tomsk.