RELOCATION HELP: Many Alaskan coastal communities have struggled to relocate for years as climate change ravages their way of life. Pictured: Aleknagik, Alaska.
Image: Flickr/J. Stephen Conn
Superstorm Sandy was a dramatic preview of what cities on the Eastern Seaboard might expect as climate change intensifies, but 12 small, indigenous communities on Alaska's coast provide the most extreme example of how global warming can wreak havoc.
Flooding, building collapses due to erosion and severe water pollution are only some of the many problems that have troubled these villages.
But according to Alaskan human rights attorney Robin Bronen, the situation is worsened by the lack of government framework to help communities so battered by climate change that they must relocate entirely. Because such a move is unprecedented, several communities' relocation attempts have been stalled for up to 10 years.
Speaking at a Brookings Institution panel on Arctic Indigenous Peoples, Displacement and Climate Change yesterday in Washington, D.C., Bronen presented a paper on the challenges Alaskan indigenous communities face as they try to move to higher, drier ground. Many of these efforts have been stalled because there is little government support, on both the state and federal level, for the difficult and expensive task of relocating an entire town.
Three communities "have been desperately trying to relocate for decades," she said. "I'm just stunned by how challenging the relocation effort is."
Shrinking Arctic sea ice spells disaster
In her presentation, Bronen explained that global warming has had a more dramatic effect on Alaska than in the contiguous United States. Over the past 50 years, warming in the state has been double the global average, and by 2030 temperatures there could rise by up to 3 degrees Celsius.
As a result, the Arctic sea ice cover is shrinking at an unprecedented pace (ClimateWire, Dec. 6, 2012). Bronen reports that the permafrost that lies below many Native communities is melting away. According to a 2003 report by the Government Accountability Office, 184 out of 213 Alaska Native villages are affected by flooding and erosion.
In western Alaska, the Arctic sea ice serves as a barrier between coastal towns and hurricane-force storm surges originating in the Bering and Chukchi seas. But since the 1980s, the sea ice cover has been delayed by several weeks in autumn, leaving communities more vulnerable to extreme weather events (ClimateWire, Nov. 10, 2011).
This has resulted in a plethora of state and federal disaster declarations in indigenous communities, including one in August of last year. A record rainfall in the Inupiat Eskimo village of Kivalina flooded two nearby rivers, which flowed into a landfill and contaminated the town water supply. The state of Alaska declared a disaster emergency in the city on Aug. 20.
State support group gets dismantled
Rather than continue to struggle against storms, permafrost melt and erosion, Kivalina and three other Alaska Native villages -- Newtok, Shishmaref and Shaktoolik -- have all decided to relocate their communities in the past 10 years. But their attempts have been hindered by the difficulty of obtaining government approval or funding.
When Shishmaref and Kivalina decided on a new site for their villages, Alaskan government agencies rejected their proposal because they found the permafrost at the site was likely to melt in the near future.
In response to these challenges, the Alaskan government formed the Alaska Climate Change Impact Mitigation Program (ACCIMP) in 2008, which provides funding for a limited number of villages affected by climate change, including Shishmaref, Kivalina and Shaktoolik.
But the group that recommended the formation of the ACCIMP is no longer in place. The Immediate Action Workgroup was a multidisciplinary, intergovernmental group formed under then-Gov. Sarah Palin in 2007, responsible for assessing climate change impacts on Alaska's coastal communities. Gov. Sean Parnell did not reauthorize the group to continue its work in 2011, and it has not met since.
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8 Comments
Add CommentKey heavy sarcasm:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou notice, of course, how proactive former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin had been in addressing these well-documented existential problems of her Native constituents. She lobbied fiercely in Washington for funding to relocate these ancient communities.
Uh, what's that you say? She never did even BEGIN to address these established issues. Instead, she bailed part-way through her term, when the money offers for speeches were more attractive than her responsibility to her constituents.
Shucks...guess there is no Santa Claus...
QED
I usually don't bother to address spelling, grammar and syntax on-line. It's so common now...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut this one really got to me, especially as it was in the context of a fairy tale.
Soon to be a full scale tragedy. What is Alaska doing with its oil revenue?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs the lack of action due to the Alaskan State Government's rejection of Global Warming, or is it because they are acting from an endemic bigotry against Native Americans?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI spent a lot of time in Alaska. Never met a person who said it was getting too warm. I met a few who had moved from Fairbanks to Anchorage because they said Fairbanks was too cold.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy do they need help to move? i've never received Government help to move anywhere... Stalled for 10 years? What might they have accomplished in 10 years if they'd been working to move, instead of waiting on whatever they're waiting on?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat a bunch of hooey. Talk about cherry-picking data sets. Well, here is one for you: in the last decade Alaska has COOLED 2.4F. This is the kind of journalism we get when science has been hijacked by politics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree. And don't be surprised if somebody comes along and says 13 years is not enough time to make a statement about trends.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDon't worry though, I have your back with trends for Alaska cooling for the past 35 years: http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/7711Change.html
So you're right. The real world data makes articles like this seem quite biased and unscientific.