Climate Change

The mountain goat is one of nature’s most skilled mountaineers. The hooved herds make their way through harsh Alpine terrain with relative ease. And they’ve been living with mountain snow since the Ice Age.

According to wildlife ecologist Kevin White, that also means that they live amid avalanche paths.

“And they would have no way of knowing that,” White said. “They can’t login to the avalanche forecasters’ website.”

White is a scientist at the University of Alaska Southeast and the University of Victoria who has been tracking mountain goats to see how they meet their end. It turns out, avalanches are a leading cause of death.

According to a new study published in the journal Communications Biology, snow slides have taken out up to 22% of the goat population in the most extreme years. The research, led by White and collaborators from the University of Alaska and institutions in Montana and Switzerland, shows the scale of that mortality for the first time.

Scientists know a lot about goats’ relationship with snow. Heavy snowfall can bury food or make it more difficult for goats to move around, which can have a negative effect on survival. 

But the role of avalanches has always been unclear, in part because a lot of mountain goat research is conducted in the summer, and in part because avalanche paths are remote and hard to access. 

“Avalanche shoots are often a tangle of alders and Devil’s Club and salmonberry and difficult hiking to get to those sites,” White said. 

White spent nearly 20 years trekking to these locations to do detective work on goat deaths, first with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and later as a researcher who processed that data with funding from the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center.

He spent countless hours hovering above mountainsides in helicopters and small planes, where he first targeted goats from a distance with tranquilizers before fitting them with a GPS collar. 

White collared 421 goats in Klukwan, Lynn Canal, Baranof Island and Cleveland Peninsula. Then, he waited for them to die.

Some caught disease. Some couldn’t get enough food. Some were caught by predators. A lot of those deaths were the youngest and the oldest, the most vulnerable in the population.

“But in the case of avalanches, it’s essentially selecting individuals out of the population at random,” White said.

Meaning avalanches can take out goats that are in the prime of their lives, including females who are the perfect age for reproduction. That can be a tough loss for local populations. 

According to University of Alaska Southeast snow scientist Eran Hood, a co-author on the study, the new research also revealed a surprising coincidence. Avalanche-prone slopes are usually between 30 and 45 degrees — shallow enough for snow to accumulate, but steep enough for gravity to eventually pull it down. 

“Well it turns out that the most common slope angle for mountain goat habitat is in the forty degree range,” Hood said. “So basically, the range of terrain where they like to hang out is right in the center of the most common slope angle for avalanches.” 

If goats are risking their lives by spending time in avalanche terrain, the researchers believe there must be an evolutionary trade-off that offsets the enormous loss of life. Figuring out what, precisely, it is will require more research. 

Avoiding predators who can’t make it up that high in the mountains is one possibility. Another is that snow slides unbury the food. 

“Those slopes may green up sooner in the spring. And the first flush of green vegetation has really high nutritional quality,” White said. “In some areas appears to coincide with when female mountain goats are giving birth to their kids, which requires a lot of energy.”

On average, avalanches caused 8% of annual mountain goat deaths. In some years, they caused none. And in the most extreme years, in the most extreme locations, they caused 22% of deaths in the population.

Avalanche risk varies a lot from year to year, Hood said. So it’s important for wildlife managers to keep that in mind when setting annual hunting limits. 

“If you knew in a winter that 22% of the population got taken out by avalanches, you should certainly be considering that in decisions you make with regard to harvest,” he said.

And as climate-sensitive mountain goats adapt to rapidly changing high mountain conditions, with more temperature variability and changing snow patterns, their relationship with avalanches may continue to change too.

White-tailed deer have expanded their range in North America over many decades. Since the early-2000s, these deer have moved north into the boreal forests of western Canada. These forests are full of spruce and pine trees, sandy soil and freezing winters with lots of snow. They’re basically your typical winter wonderland in theory — but actually living there can be harsh.

Ecologists haven’t known whether a warmer climate in these forests is drawing deer north, or whether human land development might play a bigger role.

“Human land use and climate change are both leading causes of biodiversity loss. But more often than not, those two things are highly intertwined, and it’s really tricky to tell which one is the root cause — or if it’s both,” Melanie Dickie, a wildlife biologist at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan says. “We really need to know which one it is so we can have a better idea of what to do about it.

Dickie described these deer as an “invasive species.” Because more deer in these forests can have an impact on other species like boreal caribou. With deer come more predators like wolves. While deer are able to cope with living alongside predators like wolves, caribou are not. Dickie says they’ve evolved to mostly just avoid areas with lots of predators. And that gets tricky when there are more wolves around.

She also says that deer are really just one piece of the puzzle for boreal caribou — but having more information about what exactly is driving deer expansion helps her and other researchers figure out where to start when it comes to restoring land and protecting wildlife.

Read the study in Global Change Biology

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Today’s episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and Kai McNamee. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata. Emily Kwong, Regina G. Barber and Rachel Carlson checked the facts. Patrick Murray and Stu Rushfield were the audio engineers.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

For the Aaluk Crew, last Wednesday was cooking day.

The night before, the whaling crew, captained by Bernadette and Quincy Adams, had landed the first bowhead whale of Utqiaġvik’s spring season. The crew flag, featuring a harpooned bowhead tail framed by a sunset, waved above the Adams’ two-story home, signaling the successful hunt.

The garage door rolled up and steam flooded out into the yard.

Inside was a picture of a jubilant chaos. Late 2000’s pop music blasted from a bluetooth speaker as crew members and family bustled between huge pots, tending to different cuts of meat — boiling slices of bowhead blubber and skin, or uunaalik, heart, tongue and intestines.

Children ran underfoot, people fed babies tiny pieces of cooked meat. A husky named Avvaq sat tied up in the snow, hoping for scraps. Laughter ricocheted off the walls. Everyone buzzed with excitement for Utqiaġvik’s first spring bowhead.

“Whaling brings so much joy,” said Natasha Itta, a member of the Aaluk Crew.

Meat from this catch will feed the crew and their neighbors for months to come. It will also be sent to other North Slope villages and even family in the Lower 48.

“The bounty just goes all over the place,” Itta said.

For Inupiat communities on the North Slope, bowhead whaling is a central part of spring. But climate change is adding an extra element of uncertainty to the whaling season.

Warmer temperatures are driving a decline in the region’s sea ice, which is forming later in winter and thawing earlier.  Whalers say the shorefast ice, or the ice still attached to the coastline at this time of year, is becoming thinner and less predictable. That poses an extra challenge — and possible danger — for crews, who must cross the ice to reach open water and then rely on it when they pull in whales that can weigh more than 60 tons.

Itta said a possible future without stable ice and successful spring hunts is scary to think about.

She said whalers are thinking about how to adjust if the shorefast ice won’t support spring whaling in the future, like potentially going out earlier in the season when the ice is firmer — but then there’s a risk that whales won’t be migrating yet.

“It’s going to take a lot of adapting,” Itta said. Traditionally, bowhead whaling starts in late March or early April, with feasts and festivals following in the summer. Losing that rhythm would be hard, Itta said. “It’s almost like you lose a piece of your identity. Because that’s who we’ve always been, that’s who we’re going to be.”

But this season is already a success. It also marked an important milestone: the 31-foot-whale caught by the Adams crew was landed by 17-year-old Donald “Button” Adams — his first as striker.

Donald is the son of the Aaluk Crew captains Bernadette and Quincy Adams. He’s not one to brag.

“I don’t know. It’s pretty cool,” he said with a shrug, in a crowded kitchen.

But his parents couldn’t hide their quiet pride.

“It’s a big deal. He’s been working really, really hard,” said Bernadette Adams, Donald’s stepmom. In 2014, Bernadette became the first known woman from Utqiaġvik to land a bowhead.

Donald has been going out on the ice since he was seven years old, learning from his parents: “What to look for on the ice, when to go out, when not to go out, which way the wind direction is going,” he said.

For several years, he’s been training to take on the role of striker from his father, Quincy. The striker stands in the bow of the boat and launches the darting gun to harpoon the bowhead.

On the night of the successful hunt, the crew set out just before midnight, Donald said. They prayed with the boat and then launched it from the ice.

“The water was pretty flat, almost glass,” he said. “Then we saw a whale along the tuvak — that’s the edge of the ice where the ice and the water meet.”

That first whale quickly disappeared. But soon, the crew spotted another one, about 300 yards out. As they sped towards the second whale, Donald said, they saw it spout just 20 feet away, and closed in to where they expected it to surface next.

“Sure enough, right beside us the whale popped up,” Donald said. He threw the harpoon. “It was a good shot, too.”

Experienced hunters themselves, Donald’s parents know what it takes to be a successful striker.

“We told him you gotta show us you can do it,” Bernadette said. “We made him go and help cut multiple whales. ‘You got to ask questions,’ I said. ‘It’s not just from us you’re gonna learn, it’s from everybody else.’”

Donald was ready to serve as striker last fall — until he broke his leg in an accident on the boat. Just then, the crew spotted a whale. Despite his broken leg, Donald refused to let them turn around, Bernadette said.

“He was like ‘just go after it!’” Bernadette recalled.

Quincy said it’s hard to express how it felt to watch his son take on this new role.

“I don’t have any words for that,” he said. “I don’t have any words for watching that happen. It’s just so humbling to see.”

The crew towed the 32-ton whale back to their camp and heaved it onto the ice with the help of snow machines. It took about 40 people another six hours to process the catch to bring into town, Donald said.

In the garage on cooking day, teenagers darted in and out with massive sheet trays, sliding batches of cooked meat into plastic totes lined with trash bags to share with anyone from the community who stopped by.

In the yard outside the Adams’ house, big chunks of meat lay scattered in the snow, waiting to be processed. Quincy and a few other men cracked jokes while they portioned out cuts for crew and family.

Whaling is about providing for others, Quincy said.

“It’s just built in us. It’s something that we yearn to do,” he said. “If we’re not successful, then we find other ways to feed the community. But doing this and feeding the community is what it’s all about.”

This first bowhead was an auspicious start to Utqiaġvik’s spring whaling season. Since last week, crews have caught five more.

A new University of Alaska research project will look at how human-caused climate change affects fishing, farming and harvesting in the Gulf of Alaska to build resilience for communities that rely on the ocean.

$20 million dollars of funding from the National Science Foundation will support the work of 23 researchers at all three University of Alaska campuses in Fairbanks, Juneau and Anchorage.

Jason Fellman of the Alaska Coastal Rainforest Center is one of the principal investigators on the Interface of Change project. He says warming from the burning of fossil fuels is changing the weather across Southeast Alaska, bringing more extreme rainfall and less winter snow.

It’s also rapidly accelerating glacial melt, which creates a steady trickle of freshwater, sediment and nutrients. 

“What’s running off the landscape potentially ends up in the nearshore marine,” Fellman said. “So these connections — land ocean connections — could be changing quite rapidly.”

Understanding those changing connections is important because the Gulf of Alaska supports vital commercial and subsistence harvests. 

The five-year project will examine important marine foods like red seaweeds, kelp, oysters, clams, mussels and salmon to see how they might be responding to the changing environment.

It will also focus on questions about mariculture. The industry is booming in Alaska, but it’s still young. 

“There’s still a lot to learn about this type of farming in the Gulf of Alaska,” Fellman said. “Maybe glacial runoff is driving places that are more suitable, or less, to growing seaweeds or kelps or something like that. Those are the types of questions we don’t know.”

Davin Holen, a coastal community resilience specialist with Alaska Sea Grant and one of the project’s five principal investigators, says the research will support the harvesting of traditional foods, too.

The goal is to create tools that people can use to adapt the timing and location of their subsistence harvests to keep up with a changing climate. There will also be projects focused on diversifying which species are gathered, and reconnecting younger generations to traditional foods.

“You can kind of build resilience, so that when the environment impacts one species, you still have lots of other species and the knowledge of how to harvest all those other species as part of your toolkit,” Holen said.

The researchers will work closely with industry partners, local science centers, and tribes in Juneau, Haines, Klukwan, Seldovia, Halibut Cove, Homer, Cordova and Valdez. 

Research efforts will kick off this summer.

Negotiators from about 175 countries have been sparring for more than a year over a treaty to clean up plastic pollution that’s choking rivers and piling up in landfills. As a critical new round of deliberations starts this week in Canada, the talks are floundering.

Some scientists and civil society groups say the United States bears a lot of the blame.

Almost every piece of plastic is made from fossil fuels, and major oil and natural gas producers like Russia and Saudi Arabia have also been widely criticized for throwing up roadblocks in the negotiations. However, scientists and environmentalists following the talks say the U.S. exerts outsized influence on the process. The country is the top producer of oil and gas globally, and it has the world’s biggest economy, which has historically given the U.S. huge sway in environmental negotiations.

So far, American negotiators have been unwilling to push for measures in the treaty that would drive big cuts in plastic waste, critics say, like caps on manufacturing. Instead, they say, U.S. government representatives have put their weight behind policies around recycling and waste management that are favored by the country’s giant fossil fuel and petrochemical industries. Researchers say those actions on their own won’t drastically reduce plastic pollution.

“I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that where we’re headed at right now with progress in negotiations is towards failure. And if there’s one country that I think is responsible for that, I think it’s the United States,” says Douglas McCauley, a professor of environmental science at University of California, Santa Barbara, who has consulted with the U.S. State Department about the treaty and is attending the talks in Ottawa.

NPR spoke to seven scientists and environmental advocates who have consulted with the U.S. government about the plastics negotiations, some multiple times. Many of those experts contend that an absence of U.S. leadership is hindering efforts to push forward a treaty with effective regulations. The outcome of the negotiations could also have big implications for human health. A recent study found plastics contain more than 4,200 hazardous chemicals, the vast majority of which aren’t regulated globally, according to the researchers.

“It’s not that the U.S. is actively opposing some of these policies that could make a difference,” McCauley says. “It’s that they are showing no action whatsoever, no ambition whatsoever, for adopting any of these policies.”

In a letter to President Biden in March, a coalition of more than 300 scientists said policy recommendations the government received from plastic manufacturers — and the government’s own stance in the talks to date — are “inconsistent” with efforts to deal comprehensively with plastic waste. And a group of nine Democratic attorneys general whose states are grappling with plastic pollution recently urged the U.S. treaty delegation to back stronger global rules, saying the country is “uniquely positioned” to influence the negotiations.

“There is an important role the U.S. could play in addressing the growing influence of industry on these negotiations,” says Carroll Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International Environmental Law who is an observer at the negotiations and whose organization has consulted with the State Department about the treaty. “So far, we have yet to see the U.S. on the right side of that issue.”

A State Department spokesperson said in a statement to NPR that U.S. officials met with “a wide set of stakeholders” ahead of the negotiations in Canada, and that the country has a “central role in bridging differing positions” in the talks. For an agreement to be effective, it needs to be supported by every country, the spokesperson said, including major plastic producers and consumers.

Matt Seaholm, chief executive of a business group called the Plastics Industry Association, says the U.S. is doing “a very good job of trying to balance all of the interests” of different stakeholders.

“The U.S. government has positioned itself well to drive forward a workable, consensus-based agreement,” Ross Eisenberg, president of another industry group called America’s Plastic Makers, said in a statement.

It’s a pivotal moment in the negotiations

The world produces about 400 million metric tons of plastic waste every year, according to the United Nations Environment Programme — roughly the weight of every human on the planet. Most of it ends up in places like oceans, shorelines and landfills, where it breaks down into tiny pieces called microplastics that have been found in every corner of the environment and inside human bodies.

The problem is getting worse. The amount of plastic waste the world produces is expected to almost triple in the coming decades, with less than a fifth recycled, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. So in 2022, countries agreed to negotiate a legally binding agreement to “end plastic pollution.”

With months to go before a deadline to hash out the treaty, interest groups on all sides of the issue say this is a pivotal moment. The last round of negotiations in Kenya ended in deadlock. Afterward, environmental groups warned the talks were at risk of collapsing after some oil- and gas-producing countries blocked a final decision on how to move forward.

The negotiations are happening at a time when the oil and gas industry increasingly sees petrochemicals as a core part of their business. Efforts to limit the risks from climate change threaten demand for fossil fuels, but oil and gas demand for petrochemicals is expected to keep rising for years, industry analysts say.

Magnus Løvold, a policy advisor at the Norwegian Academy of International Law, says fossil-fuel producers including Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran and Bahrain “want this process to fail.”

An observer at the negotiations, Løvold adds: “The reason for that is that these countries, they have huge oil production, they have a considerable petrochemical industry, so they see that regulation of plastics is a threat to their economic interest.”

The U.S. is a giant in those same industries. Booming production of American natural gas has propelled plastic manufacturing around the world. Last year, the country produced, consumed and exported a record amount of ethane, which is used in plastic manufacturing and almost always comes from natural gas when it is produced in the U.S.

Experts who have met with the State Department and who have attended the talks say U.S. negotiators could be handcuffed by domestic politics. It would be “probably impossible” for the Biden administration to convince two-thirds of the Senate to approve a plastics treaty, says Løvold of the Norwegian Academy of International Law.

The U.S. government “does not want to be the bad guy,” says Erica Nuñez, head of The Ocean Foundation’s plastics initiative who has consulted with the State Department. “I think they do really want to come out of this with some wins. And I think they’re very challenged right now in identifying what those wins are [realistically] within the U.S. context.”

Against the backdrop of booming fossil fuel production, U.S. negotiators at the talks have declined to back a binding global agreement, say the state attorneys general and environmental advocates who have attended the talks. Instead, they say the U.S. has sought an accord that would leave countries free to decide for themselves how to clean up plastic pollution.

“The U.S. is really trying to reshape what could be a binding global treaty with binding global targets into a ground-up treaty where every country just says, ‘Alright, this is what we’re willing to do,'” says Muffett of the Center for International Environmental Law. “And that is inadequate.”

A State Department spokesperson said the agreement needs to include “universal obligations,” but that “overly prescriptive approaches” could dissuade countries that are big producers and consumers of plastic from joining. Countries should be able to meet their obligations “in ways that take into account their respective priorities and circumstances,” the spokesperson said.

The plastic industry says cutting production is off limits

The plastics industry is fighting on two fronts to block treaty provisions that could constrain manufacturing. It is trying to stop countries from limiting how much new plastic is produced, and it opposes global regulations on the chemicals that companies use.

Scientists and environmental advocates say that to make a significant dent in plastic pollution, countries have to cut how much new plastic they manufacture. But plastic makers and the oil and gas industry, which includes national oil companies and publicly traded corporations, say the world needs all the plastic they can produce, and that negotiators should focus on creating a so-called circular economy where plastic is recycled and reused to prevent waste.

The industry is making that argument at the same time it tries to fend off scrutiny of a decades-long controversial campaign to sell recycling to the public. Investigations, including by NPR, have shown the plastics industry promoted recycling even though officials long knew that it probably wouldn’t work on a large scale. Former industry officials have said the goal was to avoid regulations and ensure demand for plastics kept growing.

Current officials have said those investigations don’t accurately portray today’s industry.

“We fully and readily admit that we don’t recycle enough plastic,” says Seaholm of the Plastics Industry Association. “But what we’re saying is we want to recycle more. The industry is putting billions of dollars into recycling technologies that get us where we need to be.”

Seaholm says the industry also supports policies to encourage recycling, like making producers help pay for recycling infrastructure, and requiring companies to use some recycled material in plastic products.

A lot of experts say recycling will have to be part of the solution, because plastic is ingrained in modern life. But they say governments need to regulate manufacturing for recycling to work. The Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty, which includes major brands like Coca-Cola, Unilever and Walmart, is calling for governments to phase out “problematic plastics” that are hard to recycle or that are likely to end up as waste in the environment.

A State Department spokesperson said the U.S. is advocating for measures to reduce demand for new plastic, including through government procurement policies. However, the spokesperson said countries wouldn’t be stopped from also trying to limit the supply of new plastic. A lot of countries want to do that with caps on manufacturing.

Reducing demand for new plastic is “great,” says Nuñez of The Ocean Foundation. But “we still need to directly implement policies to limit fossil fuel extraction — which is something that the U.S. is avoiding,” she says.

As for the chemicals that go into plastic, industry representatives say they should be regulated by national governments, not by a global treaty on plastic pollution.

But scientists and environmental advocates calling for global chemical regulations note that plastic waste – and the chemicals it’s made from – doesn’t stay in the country where it is produced. It floats down rivers and around oceans.

To protect people and the environment, governments that are part of the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution, including the European Union, Canada, and the United Kingdom, as well as a number of developing countries from Rwanda to the Maldives, want to “eliminate and restrict” hazardous plastics and chemicals globally. They also want to force companies to disclose information about the chemicals they use.

“We have the evidence to show that human health and environmental health are being impacted,” says Susanne Brander, an ecotoxicologist at Oregon State University who was on a call recently with the State Department discussing the plastics treaty. “If we can’t get information on what’s being used,” she adds, “we have no way of truly making these products safer.”

Lawmakers and observers warn of industry influence

But groups advocating for aggressive global rules say there’s been little progress in the negotiations. After more than a year of talks, governments still haven’t come up with a plan that has the “ambition and strength” to limit plastic production and cut down on pollution, the group of state attorneys general wrote to the State Department earlier this month. The group faulted the U.S. delegation for taking a position that “lacks concrete objectives or standards.”

“The United States has the power to persuade and to be forward-leaning,” says Margaret Spring, chief conservation and science officer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium who has consulted with the State Department on the plastics treaty and is leading a delegation at the talks for the International Science Council. “Right now, you’ve seen other countries doing that. And so that’s been disappointing to many of us.”

Negotiators face intense lobbying from groups that have big financial stakes in the plastics industry. The influence of plastic producers and petrochemical companies is “one of the largest barriers to strong action,” a group of Democrat lawmakers, as well as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an Independent, and Mohammed Chahim, a member of the European Parliament, wrote recently to Biden and leaders of the UN and European Commission.

Ahead of this week’s negotiations in Canada, the industry said it would be a mistake to talk much about manufacturing. “Certainly there are those in the [Biden] administration who would like to see some much more aggressive policies towards our industry, which we certainly don’t agree with,” says Seaholm of the Plastics Industry Association. “But there are those who are truly honest brokers that we’re continuing to work with.”

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

The Yup’ik village of Newtok, perched precariously on thawing permafrost at the edge of the rapidly eroding Ninglick River, is the first Alaska community to begin a full-scale relocation made necessary by climate change.

Still, the progress of moving to a new village site that is significantly outpacing relocation efforts at other vulnerable Alaska communities, remains agonizingly slow, say those who are in the throes of the transformation.

“There is no blueprint on how to do this relocation,” said Carolyn George, one of those still living in Newtok. “We’re relocating the whole community to a whole different place, and we did not know how to do it. And it’s been taking too long — over 20 years, I think.”

George, who works at the Newtok school, was one of the self-described “Newtok mothers” who made comments at a panel discussion at the recent Arctic Encounter Symposium in Anchorage. The river waters, once at least a mile away, have edged closer and closer, and the village, once sitting high on the landscape, continues to sink as that permafrost thaws, she said.

Plans to move Newtok started to solidify in 2006 with the formation of the local-state-federal Newtok Planning Group, but that followed many years of debate and study that led to the decision to relocate. according to the Alaska Division of Community and Regional Affairs. The new site, about 9 miles away on the south side of the Ninglick River, is called Mertarvik, meaning “getting water from the spring.”

In 2019, the first Mertarvik residents settled into their new homes. As of now, more than half of the residents have moved to Mertarvik.

The latest count is 220 in Mertarvik and 129 still at Newtok, said Christina Waska, the relocation coordinator for the Newtok Village Tribal government.

The goal is to have everyone in Mertarvik by the fall, even if that means some people will be living in temporary housing, like construction work camps.

“Our ultimate goal is to not leave anyone behind,” she said.

With a single local government, a single Tribal government and unified services like mail delivery, Newtok and Mertarvik technically make up a single community. But often it does not feel that way.

George is among those coping with a sense of limbo.

Her five daughters and their father have moved to a new house in Mertarvik, but she remains in Newtok because of her job. That is a hardship, she said. “Being alone, I get anxiety, and I miss my girls, you know. Especially at night,” she said.

And the school where she works, and which is set to be demolished this summer, is in dire shape.

The four classrooms are heated by a small generator. There is no food cooked on-site for the kids. There is no plumbing – a situation that, for now, is being addressed with a “bathroom bus” that shuttles kids to their homes as needed.

Conditions are notably better at Mertarvik, said speakers at the conference.

Lisa Charles, another panel member, described the difficult conditions her family left behind in Newtok. The family was packed into a too-small, two-bedroom house with thawing permafrost below and mold growing inside. It took a toll on their physical well-being, she said.

But once the family settled in at Mertarvik, things improved, she said.

“After moving over to the new village site, we noticed all of our health improved, especially for my daughter that grew up with asthma,” Charles said. “After we moved over to our new home, she grew out of her asthma problem.”

There have been complications, like power outages affecting the school, attributed to demand that outstripped capacity.

Among the challenges is a timing mismatch. Waska and new Tribal administrator Calvin Tom started their jobs only recently, too late for them to place summer barge orders, and as a consequence, no building materials are expected to be barged in 2024 and no new houses will be built this summer in Mertarvik, Waska said.

There is still plenty of work to be done aside from construction, she said. And construction is seen as a process that will continue long after all residents are settled at Mertarvik, she added.

“It’ll never be done. If you look at every village, even Anchorage, Fairbanks, it’s always under construction,” she said.

While Newtok is the first Alaska village to relocate, others will follow.

Even two decades ago, 31 communities were identified as facing imminent threats that would make their locations potentially unlivable in the near future. Of those, nearly half were planning or considering some form of relocation.

Next after Newtok to relocate entirely may be Kivalina, an Inupiat village on the Chukchi Sea coast that is facing numerous climate stressors along with rapid erosion. The community now has a new evacuation road, completed in 2021, that can better enable movement to a new site.

But plans hit a snag after a study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers revealed that the originally chosen relocation site, called Kiniktuuraq, is also vulnerable to the same climate change stressors that are expected to make Kivalina uninhabitable in the relatively near future.

Napakiak, a Yup’ik village perched on a section of eroding land along the Kuskokwim River that is being quickly eaten away in large chunks, has also made progress. The community is now engaged in a partial relocation, a strategy known as “managed retreat.” Some families have already moved from vulnerable sites to safer ground upland, and there is state money available for a new school to replace the erosion-threatened building.

There is no single source of money to pay for relocation work, even for the Newtok-Mertarvik transformation, the most advanced of the projects.

The Newtok-Mertarvik move has been funded through various allocations over time. Among the recent infusions were $25 million through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and another $6.7 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Napakiak received a similar $25 million grant through the infrastructure law and a $2.4 million infusion earlier this year from FEMA.

The combined costs of full and partial relocations for all the villages that need them are expected to be staggering.

Of 144 Alaska Native villages with damages from flooding, erosion, permafrost thaw or some combination of those impacts, costs for protecting infrastructure are expected to mount to $3.45 billion over the next 50 years, according to a 2020 report by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. An additional $833 million is needed to protect the hub communities of Utqiagvik, Nome, Bethel, Kotzebue, Dillingham and Unalaska, said the 2020 BIA report, which was produced in cooperation with the Denali Commission and other agencies.

The sources for the needed funding remain unclear, and bureaucratic hurdles are delaying progress toward necessary relocations, a recent report from the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium said.

There are fundamental obstacles in rural Alaska that make it extremely difficult for Alaska communities to work through the federal system, said Jackie Qataliña Schaeffer, ANTHC’s director for climate initiatives.

She cited an example during the Arctic Encounter Symposium forum. “Every federal agency requires you to have some type of reporting and in most of the cases you have to apply for the federal funding online. If you don’t have stable internet, how do you do that?” she said.

The ANTHC report recommends an overhaul to streamline a process that is a poor fit for remote Alaska villages.

In some ways, the Newtok-Mertarvik residents said, their split community has successfully overcome difficult challenges, making their relocation a possible example for other threatened communities in Alaska and elsewhere in the United States.

But those successes can also be bittersweet.

Relocation is absolutely necessary because the old village site is now an unhealthy place to live, Waska said. Nonetheless, she feels conflicted about abandoning the hometown she loves.

“Newtok is my home. It’s kind of sad. It kind of breaks my heart that Newtok is no longer going to be there,” she said.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.