The northwestern Alaskan village of Kivalina is perched on a remote and narrow strip of sand next to the frigid waters of the Chukchi sea. Its 400 residents are the descendants of an Iñupiat tribe.
And in just 10 years, these folk might just be America’s first climate change refugees.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers predicts that Kivalina will be completely uninhabitable by 2025, a victim of melting ice, coastal erosion and rising sea levels.
For years, the Iñupiat people have relied on a thick build-up of Arctic ice to protect their shores from erosion and storms. But as temperatures climb, the ice is forming later and melting earlier, according to scientist Christine Shearer, author of Kivalina: A Climate Change Story.
This means that dangerous winter storms have devoured the island at alarmingly fast rates up to 70 feet of land at a time.
The Army Corps of Engineers built a sea wall in 2008 to defend against the storms, but that hasn’t protected the island from flooding.
Two years ago, a savage storm forced residents to temporarily evacuate their village
The area was originally just a seasonal hunting ground, until the federal government threatened local people with jailtime unless they agreed to settle and enroll their kids in a school, Shearer reports.
Now, Kivalina residents have no choice but to leave. They officially voted to move out of their hometown in 1992. But that comes with a steep price tag. It’s not just a matter of relocating the villagers to a higher ground. The U.S. government would have to build a road, houses, and a new school for the children. Accomplishing this in such a remote area could cost up to $400 million, the BBC reports. And there’s no indication that the money is arriving any time soon.
In the meantime, the village has a more pressing problem to sort through. Last year’s late-summer storms have damaged its 3-mile water supply pipeline, leaving its citizens without a reliable source of treated water.
It will cost around $20,000 to replace the pipeline, according to city manager Janet Mitchell.
“We have a lot of obligations and not enough revenue,” she told The Associated Press.
Residents have been forced to take sponge baths and some are collecting rainwater and river water to make do. During winter, some people melted ice and snow.
The village also had to delay classes for five weeks last year because its school building didn’t have clean water.
Since Kivalina homes have never had running water, its residents relied on a washeteria, a building where people can take showers and wash clothes. The washeteria shut down in February, due to frozen pipes.
The New York Times, 2014