The 26-year-old northern Canadian magazine, Up Here, has published its first swimsuit issue to draw attention to climate change.

Its latest edition, out this week, features 10 swimsuit-clad women posing in threatened northern landscapes such as burnt-out forests and melting icescapes.

Why swimsuits?

"When you want to get attention in a room full of people talking, you tend to yell," writes Tim Querengesser on Up Here's blog. "So, when we decided to dedicate an entire issue to climate change in the North...we knew we'd have to yell to be heard above the already deafening howl."

Up Here , based in Yellowknife and named magazine of the year at the National Magazine Awards in June, focuses on northern culture, lifestyle, arts and travel.

"It wasn't long ago that you'd never see a bikini up North," the magazine says in introducing its swimsuit spread. "But if our territories keep warming a degree per decade, swimsuits will one day replace parkas. What may be jarring now won't be jarring soon."

Shannon Ripley of Ecology North, a Yellowknife-based environmental group, asked why the magazine didn't also feature scantily-clad men, reports the Canadian Broadcasting Centre.

"We liked the idea of … taking this sort of stereotypical 'swimsuit issue' concept that Sports Illustrated has made sort of legendary, and putting a total Arctic twist on it," the magazine's editor Aaron Spitzer says in the story. "And they don't put guys in their swimsuit issues."