Climate change has hit home, and hit hard, for a small and remote Alaskan town faced with the prospect of having to relocate, officials say.
Kivalina is a village of 400 residents on a vulnerable barrier island in the Chukchi Sea, some 80 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
Unreachable by any road, it is home to some of the region's Iñupiat people, who for generations have hunted bowhead whales after setting up camps on sea ice stretching away from the town's shorelines.
However, climate change is causing that sea ice to thin to the point where it is dangerous to venture onto it in search of whales, and soon it may no longer protect the fragile barrier island and the town from powerful waves that wash through the village.
"As we grew up, we've never seen the water come over the village, but in the last 10 years, it came over the village at least three times," Millie Hawley, president of the Native Village of Kivalina, said at a town meeting last week attended by Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, the first interior secretary to visit the village since it was established 110 years ago.
"Global warming has caused us so much problems," Joseph Swan, Sr., a Kivalina elder, said at the meeting. The ice, Swan said, "does not freeze like it used to. It used to be like 10 to 8 feet thick, way out in the ocean."
The residents, along with state and federal officials, face a vexing question: Should the townspeople of Kivalina be moved either inland or farther south to a safer, less exposed location, and if so, who would foot the estimated bill of a hundred million dollars?
A proposal by President Obama to spend $50.4 million in federal funds to aid Native American communities struggling with the impacts of climate change would only pay for half of a Kivalina move alone, residents said.
"We have a whole bunch of infrastructure that we need to move, that the government should be moving themselves," says Kivalina City Council member Colleen Swan, who also participates in the town's disaster preparedness program. "I would like to live without having to worry about having to evacuate, or having to run."
Federal officials acknowledge that the proposed federal funding is insufficient.
"While we do not expect that funding of this scale could support actual relocation, it could be used to support long-term resilience planning, planning that could consider relocation as determined by the community as well as other actions and approaches," said Interior Press Secretary Jessica Kershaw.
