Alaska’s Kivalina, Endangered by Climate Change, Explores Retreat– Again

(Bloomberg) -- Over a century ago, Austin Swan’s father attended a relocation planning meeting for the village of Kivalina, a small community in the Alaskan Arctic Circle. Established on a sandy barrier island, Kivalina had an eroding coast line and needed to move further inland to protect the homes of a mostly Native community of Iñupiat residents. 

“That was when the landmass was twice what it used to be. They were talking about relocation already,” says Swan, 77, the village’s mayor. The village is only about a mile long and a few hundred feet wide. 

It’s viewed as among the most indefensible places in the US from the consequences of global warming. Remote, only accessible by plane, and built entirely on a sand bar, Kivalina has long been a case study for scientists, politicians and civil engineers, all trying to front-run a climate disaster that will sweep away the few dozen structures belonging to about 300 local residents. But despite all the interest it has amassed, almost nothing has moved. 

On a July afternoon, Swan was sitting in the front room of one of the only structures successfully relocated in the 100 years since his dad attended that meeting: the village’s school. It’s about eight miles uphill and inland, on a site identified as safer from climate change than the sand spit the current village is built on. 

The tentative plan is to move the entire village to the same plot of land, forming a town around the school building. Bountiful berry bushes separate the brand-new school building—which the state allotted $43 million to building—and the village, which lacks widespread water and sewer systems. The road to the school cost an additional $53.1 million, according to the Northwest Arctic Borough planning department.

When a storm is bad, debris and waves can crash onto the town’s airplane runway. Melting permafrost turns fields into lumpy mush. Where no puddles once formed, standing water is now constant. The small community filed a lawsuit years ago, blaming Exxon Mobil Corp. and others for the climate dangers it faced. (The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2013, effectively ending the legal battle). 

The town was supposed to be an early example of strategic retreat. The Army Corps of Engineers has long urged relocation and President Barack Obama did a flyover of the remote village, also promising a move. The Army Corps and local politicians estimate transferring the community of around 400 people could cost as much as $1 million a head. But that’s if they are able to secure the funds at all—an increasingly unlikely feat in a shrinking federal government. 

Swan was among the lawmakers, law enforcement officers, Indigenous community elders, tribal representatives and climate experts were gathered at Kivalina’s relocated school last month for a three-day summit to discuss safety in the Northwest Arctic. Attendees slept inside the school on cots, and one of the police officers who used to have a restaurant cooked group meals, with an emphasis on Costco staples. 

The conference focused on several primary topics: the murdered and missing Indigenous persons epidemic, emergency preparedness, and climate change. Neither problem has a singular solution and both, more than anything, desperately need funding that is harder to come by in a federal government defined by spending cuts. 

To kick off the event, a local emergency manager tried to parse how FEMA cuts could impact this rural Arctic community. “We need to pour more effort and diligence into our hazard mitigation planning process,” says Kelly Hamilton, the Northwest Arctic Borough official who helped organize the summit and hoped ample pre-planning for disasters could help communities facing imminent climate risk.  

In an hour-long session meant to prepare the area for climate retreat, no firm way to pay for retreat was proposed. 

“I don’t know where the funding comes from,” says State Representative Robyn Niayuq Burke, a newly elected Democrat who represents Kivalina and spoke on the panel. The area she represents is roughly the size of Germany, and she emphasized the diversity of opinions and interests among her constituents. “Even in the community that I grew up in, people don’t like to hear the term climate change. It is challenging in that way as well. Our state government is more reactive than proactive.”  

The tightening timeframe to make change was on all the panelists’ minds, even if a plan to expedite relocation had yet to be formed. 

“The frequency of the challenges of things like flooding, and coastal erosion, and the time pressure that’s on a lot of our communities is so much more frequent now than it was 10, 15, 20, 50 years ago,” says Ashley Carrick, Alaska state representative and Democrat who attended the panel alongside Burke.

Prior to the mandated schooling of local Native children, the indigenous community primarily used the areas as a seasonal hunting and fishing grounds, moving as the weather dictated. Kivalina was not settled year-round and the local community was not tethered to a sand spit hampered by winter storms. For generations, the Native community was able to maintain its subsistence lifestyle in relative peace. When missionaries, whalers, and the federal government came bursting into Alaska in the 19th century, the original residents of the Arctic found their way of life was forced to change, with permanent, year round settlements becoming the norm. 

Communities often form around schools, and by sticking the school house on a barrier island, homes and churches grew around it. No one asked the Native community if that was a particularly good location for a school, says Colleen Swan, an elder in Kivalina, who is a member of the mayor’s family.

“They dropped it on this little spit out there—a sand spit. That’s how our village started. We didn't make this decision–it was made by people who didn't know any better. Maybe they did not regard the Native people as people they could consult with,” says Colleen Swan, who also served as a councilwoman. “All of the issues we face today, they're all because we were not included in the discussion, in the planning, and most importantly the decision making.” 

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