Will the residents of Kivalina, Alaska be the first climate change refugees in the US?
Scientists estimate that due to climate change, the village of Kivalina, in northwestern Alaska, will be underwater by the year 2025.
In 2008, the Inupiat village sued 24 of the world's biggest fossil fuel companies for damages. In 2013, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case and the village has declared it will not file a new claim in state court.
Meanwhile, nature, heedless of humankind’s eternal squabbles, goes about its business: the sea around Kivalina continues to rise, the storms get stronger, the ice gets thinner — and Kivalina's 400 residents must grapple with how to relocate in the decade they're estimated to have left.
Kivalina is on a very thin barrier reef island between the Chukchi Sea and the Kivalina Lagoon, in the northwest of Alaska, above the Arctic Circle. It takes three plane flights to get there: one to Anchorage; another to a town called Kotzebue; and a third, aboard a tiny cargo plane, to Kivalina.
Kivalina City Council member Colleen Swan says the people of the village rely for food mostly on what the environment, especially the ocean, provides for them. “It’s been our way to make a living for hundreds of years,” she says. “During the winter months the ice is part of our landscape, because we go out there and we set up camps and hunt, and it's all seasonal. We were able to see the changes years ago.”
In May, June and July, the men of the village go out on the ice hunting bearded seals. They cut up the seals, dry them and store them for the winter. “That provides the winter supply,” Swan says. “That’s what keeps us warm in the Arctic.”
About 15 years ago, the villagers noticed the season started two weeks early and the ice began to thin sooner than before. “We didn't notice at first the gradual change until it became two weeks early consistently from year to year,” Swan says. Now, she says, the hunters must remain vigilant, keeping a close eye on the ice, the seals and the sea. If they don't, they could miss the hunting season. “The hardest one to swallow was the fact that our ice wasn't safe any more for us to set up whaling camps,” Swan says.
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