http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/science/nature/6230731.stm


Thursday, 4 January 2007, 22:53 GMT

Alaska natives left out in the cold

VIEWPOINT
Patricia Cochran

While the rest of the world argues about the best way to curb future
climate change, says Patricia Cochran in this week's Green Room, native
communities within the Arctic Circle are having to draw on their own
ancestral strengths to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

" A day after Christmas, the Anchorage Daily News ran an article about
flooding and erosion in small native villages on the west coast of
Alaska with names familiar to no one else except Alaskans.

But this is a very familiar story to us. With thinner sea ice arriving
later and leaving earlier in the year, coastal communities are
experiencing more intensified storms with larger waves than they have
ever experienced.

This threat is being compounded by the loss of permafrost which has kept
river banks from eroding too quickly.

The waves are larger because there is no sea ice to diminish their
intensity, slamming against the west and northern shores of Alaska,
causing severe storm driven coastal erosion.

It has become so serious that several coastal villages are now actively
trying to figure out where to move entire communities.

While the world's politicians and media focus their attention on the big
picture of agreeing the best way to curb global climate change, we are
left to pick up the pieces from wasted years of inaction.

The cost to move one small village of 300 people ranges from $130m
(£66m) to a high of $200m (£102m), even if the distance is a few miles,
because moving means reconstructing entire water, electrical, road,
airport and/or barge landing infrastructure, as well as schools and
clinics.

From their actions, it is clear that neither the federal nor state
governments are prepared for the immense cost and complexity of moving
even one tiny community.

There is no lead government agency to assist communities affected by
climate change events, and that is evident here in Alaska as small
villages are left to take the initiative to mobilise support from a
myriad government agencies to piece together some kind of incremental
financial assistance.

Unlike the communities affected by Hurricane Katrina and large single
storm events in major metropolitan areas of the continental US, northern
coastal communities experience an insidious and gradual loss of land
underneath their homes and businesses, for which there is only piecemeal
assistance.

The sad fact is, according to the Army Corp of Engineers, that more than
80% of Alaskan communities (comprised mostly of indigenous peoples) are
vulnerable to either coastal or river erosion.

Climate chain reaction

Natives have traditionally located their communities near water bodies
for access to wild foods; so here is an example of the age-old Alaska
native wisdom that "everything is connected":

Permafrost is melting all over Alaska as a result of rising
temperatures, causing land underneath many villages to subside and
softening the soil on riverbanks like the mighty Yukon River.

Mountain snow and ice melt rapidly, causing a short period when water
levels in the rivers rise and move rapidly. The high, fast flowing water
serves to wash away an unprecedented amount of riverbanks in villages.

The vast amount of soil taken into the river causes riverbeds to rise as
eroded soil accumulates on the bottom.

River depths decrease to the point where many areas are so shallow that
more and more salmon that are caught in subsistence fishing have
lesions, cuts, and scrapes as they struggle to get through very shallow
parts of the river.

The low levels that remain for the rest of the summer mean the water is
warmer than in the past, causing further stress to the fish during the
breeding season.

It may come to the stage that salmon numbers will dramatically decrease
within the foreseeable future. This in turn will affect the food
available for bears, land otters, eagles and people.

Fewer salmon carcasses taken inland and left near the rivers will
decrease the fertility of land, water, and vegetation. Most
"mainlanders" do not understand that we are talking about millions and
millions of salmon taken by wildlife every year in Alaska, so the loss
of salmon will have significant ecological impacts to land, water,
wildlife and vegetation.

Behaviour change

"What happens in Alaska will affect all other places of the world as a
cascading effect"

Significantly, diminished salmon numbers will lead to predators
uncharacteristically concentrating on other prey, perhaps creating an
imbalance and threatening the viability of the prey.

One can only imagine what decreased and changing vegetation will do to
the land-based food chains.

All of this will have a profound impact on the viability of indigenous
cultures throughout the North, and further afield. Everything is
connected in nature; what happens in Alaska will affect all other places
of the world as a cascading effect, as scientists call it, will occur.

Alaska Native Elders say we must prepare to adapt. This is a simple
instruction but it is not so easy to understand what it really means.

Adapting means more than adjusting hunting technologies and what kind of
food we eat. It means re-learning how to garner information from a
rapidly changing environment. Even science is recognising the value of
ancestral knowledge passed on to later generations of natives.

There is a reason native people have been able to survive for centuries
in the harshest of conditions, in the strangest of times; it is because
of our resilience and our adaptability.

And it is that strength from within that our communities now have to
rely upon as we face an uncertain future. "

Patricia Cochran is executive director of the Alaska Native Science
Commission, and chairwoman of the Inuit Circumpolar Council

The Green Room is a series of opinion pieces on environmental topics
running weekly on the BBC News website

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