Environment

Action urged for Alaska villages affected by climate change

Robin Bronen told the crowd at the University of Alaska Anchorage on Saturday that she got an email from a Newtok resident this week after a storm hit the flood-prone coastal village. It said, "We've made it again."

"The pictures I've gotten from Newtok are horrific," Bronen, executive director of the Alaska Institute for Justice, said at the daylong forum on the state's changing climate. "It's unconscionable that the community hasn't relocated yet."

Villagers have watched erosion eat away at their land and some must move before their homes get washed away. As they have worked through funding, political and logistical challenges, many have pointed to the Yup'ik community as a poster village of climate change.

Bronen and other speakers on a morning panel at the forum hosted by Alaska Common Ground also pointed to Newtok as one example of why action must be taken now.

"The laws that we have currently in place are anachronistic to the ways that climate change is affecting the places where we live," Bronen said.

While federal laws help communities recover from extreme weather events, they do not include language to deploy assistance for erosion, she said. The Alaska Institute for Justice, with several partnering groups, recently received a $300,000 federal grant to help Native coastal communities adapt to changes attributed to climate change.

Larry Merculieff, deputy director of the Alaska Native Science Commission, said the greatest impact of climate change is the loss of traditional knowledge and wisdom. Climate change has impacted all aspects of the subsistence way of life, from berry picking to hunting to fishing, and has created gaps between the older and younger people, he said.

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For instance, in St. Paul, the Steller sea lion population has dropped -- which Merculieff anecdotally attributed to climate change -- and experienced hunters have gone out less frequently, "leaving the younger men to fend for themselves," said Merculieff, an Aleut elder from the Pribilof Islands.

"The younger men didn't have the guidance of the wisdom of the hunters and so we are experiencing things out there that we never experienced before," he said, "like suicide, incarceration for felony crimes, murder -- those kinds of things."

Merculieff said St. Paul has started a sign-up system for young people interested in joining a hunt with a more experienced person to revive the transfer of knowledge and wisdom between generations. Meanwhile, he called on people across the globe to take action on climate change now.

"Elders around the world are now saying that there's no more time to debate whether or not climate crisis is with us and there's no more time to attend lectures, no more time to read books," he said. "The time to take action is now."

Michael Black, director of rural utility management at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, said changing permafrost means engineering assumptions have had to change, too.

In rural Alaska, plastic pipes have started to replace rigid steel pipes. Lower water conditions have also meant that source water has more sediment in it, prompting the more rapid changing of filters so that water can be purified and distributed. That also comes with added costs.

"I can say that we're not ahead of the game, we are just trying to deal with this game," he said.

Saturday's keynote speaker Bill Ross, former commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation, asked the crowd of roughly 50 people who believed in climate change and who believed humans caused it -- hands shot up. When he asked if people believed humans could make changes before the most severe impacts of climate change are felt, only a few people raised their hands.

After citing actions taken on carbon restrictions on the West Coast, Ross called on Alaska to participate in the emerging green economy, focus on renewable energy and come to the table on climate change talks.

"Alaska has one foot in the past, proudly, and one foot in the future," he said. "On the license place, where it says 'The Last Frontier,' what if it says 'The Next Frontier'? ... Because you are going to be at the forefront of this discussion."

Tegan Hanlon

Tegan Hanlon was a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News between 2013 and 2019. She now reports for Alaska Public Media.

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