Kivalina AK Residents Will Likely Be First US Climate Refugees, And As Early As 2025

[hatrack]

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.

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The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the global average, so sea ice is forming on the Kivalina coastline later in the year and melting faster in the spring and summer. The lack of sea ice makes the island vulnerable to erosion from storms that occur regularly in the fall. Lack of sea ice also means warmer waters, which increase the severity of storms that hit the island. The 2008 case against the fossil fuel companies was a 'public nuisance' claim that accused them of inflicting 'unreasonable harm' upon the villagers because they are among the world's largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Climate science is nearly unanimous on the point that increased greenhouse gases emissions are leading to sea level rise around the world.

The village originally voted to relocate as far back as 1992, but it is massively expensive. Their court case against the fossil fuel companies sought damages to help pay for the residents’ relocation. Now, with the case dismissed on the basis that its claims comes under rules of the Clean Air Act and not federal tort law, the villagers have nowhere to turn except the government. They did get a $500,000 grant last month from an arts organization to study relocation, but in general, no dice. “Whenever we bring up relocation or climate change and ask, ‘Where do we go to talk about this with the government,’ the reply is always, ‘There's no agency set up to address those questions,’” Swan says.

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http://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/will-the-residents-of-kivalina-alaska-be-the-first-climate-change-refugees-in-the-us/ar-BBlzVEo

[roguevalley]

1. i don't think it will take that long. Its in the 60s-70s here on the Kenai.