Residents of a tiny coastal town in Alaska will soon be among America’s first climate change refugees, forced from their homes by flooding caused by melting permafrost. The 340 residents of Newtok, Alaska have seen the Ninglick River overtake their town, forcing them to rely on a network of boardwalks to get from building to building. Helpless to stop the damage, Newtok residents are moving to a new site nine miles inland, on higher ground.
From Discover Magazine:
“We are seeing the erosion, flooding and sinking of our village right now,” said Stanley Tom, a Yup’ik Eskimo and tribal administrator for the Newtok Traditional Council…. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has estimated that moving Newtok could cost $130 million. Twenty-six other Alaskan villages are in immediate danger, with an additional 60 considered under threat in the next decade, according to the corps [CNN].
The townspeople’s decision illustrates global warming’s impact on people living near the Arctic. While the Yup’ik Eskimos of Newtok were making their decision, the first Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit was taking place in Anchorage, Alaska, with representatives from 80 nations on hand to discuss how global warming is affecting their communities. Indigenous people are among those contributing least to the worsening problem of greenhouse gases and climate change, said Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, president of the United Nations General Assembly. However, he said they are the first to feel the impacts of climate change [AP].
Most of us tend to think of climate refugees as poor people in places like the sinking Maldives or the flood-plagued western coast of Africa, but this just goes to show that we Americans are not immune to the effects of climate change, no matter what the majority of us might think. It’s extremely unfortunate, however, that people who have done so little to cause it compared to the rest of us have to deal it first. The bottom line is, it’s happening here, it’s happening now, and it’s not going to magically go away.
Link [Discover Magazine]
Photo credit: Wolfdance.de
