Alaska Towns at Risk from Rising Seas Sound Alarm

The U.S. government’s withdrawal from dealing with, or even acknowledging, climate change may have provoked widespread opprobrium, but for Alaskan communities at risk of toppling into the sea, the risks are rather more personal.

The Trump administration has moved to dismantle climate adaptation programs including the Denali Commission, an Anchorage-based agency that is crafting a plan to safeguard or relocate dozens of towns at risk from rising sea levels, storms, and the winnowing away of sea ice.

Federal assistance for these towns has been ponderous but could now grind to a halt, with even those working on the issue seemingly targeted by the administration.  In July Joel Clement, an interior department official who worked with Alaskan communities on climate adaptation, claimed he had been moved to a completely unrelated position because of the administration’s ideological hostility to the issue.
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According to the Army Corps of Engineers, 31 Alaskan communities face “imminent” existential threats from coastline erosion, flooding and other consequences of temperatures that are rising twice as quickly in the state as the global average.  A handful — Kivalina, Newtok, Shishmaref, and Shaktoolik — are considered in particularly perilous positions and will need to be moved.

“It was clear from the start of the Trump administration that there was no interest in helping Alaskan communities, particularly coastal communities, adapt to climate change,” said Victoria Hermann, president of the Arctic Institute.

“There’s now no liaison from Washington on the issue.  The biggest loss has been momentum.  It feels like the Obama administration was kickstarting something useful but now it has dropped dead.”

Shishmaref, like Shaktoolik and Kivalina, is a town with several hundred inhabitants located on a barrier island.  Last August, Shishmaref residents voted to relocate to the mainland but, in common with other Alaskan towns, there is no clear source of funding to do this.  Meanwhile, Newtok, which sits on the banks of a river and is losing about 70 ft of land a year to erosion, appealed in January for disaster funding to relocate.

The coastal communities are threatened by a confluence of conditions that are making life difficult even for the flinty residents, who are used to dealing with an inhospitable, remote environment.

As the coastal buffer of sea ice retreats, towns are more vulnerable to storms and coastline erosion.  Many key structures are built on permafrost, which is also melting, causing the buildings to subside or even crumple completely.  And a succession of mild years — 2016 was nearly 6F warmer than the long-term average — is disrupting the patterns of wildlife in an environment where people rely upon the animals they catch for sustenance.

“People are coping with the loss of their history, places where they could reliably hunt and gather food, their burial sites,” said Mike Brubaker, of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.  “It causes a lot of distress.  Before you see the physical impacts of climate change, you see the mental impacts.”

Read more at Alaska Towns at Risk from Rising Seas Sound Alarm