Quinhagak, everything used to be
white, you know, a
lot of snow.
You could even
go on top of the houses because
there was so much snow almost covering them. Today
there is hardly any snow. It seems like every year it gets worse.
It's not cold anymore.
Most folks are in agreement that climate change is
caused by human impacts to the environment.
We are the problem, even out
here in rural Alaska, because of our dependence on
fossil fuels. Climate change seems to be happening fastest in the north,
and there's very good reasons for this. As the growing seasons become longer and
the
snow melts earlier, as the sea ice begins to melt,
then this changes the surface of the north from
being a white covered surface to a dark covered surface for more of the year.
This means that the land and the sea absorb more energy and transfer that
to the air, causing the air to become warmer.
The net result of all of this is that the north warms fastest,
and warms a greater degree than is happening anywhere else on the planet.
How is climate change affecting Alaskans?
Well, throughout Alaska people are seeing changes in the places where they live.
We're standing on Koyukuk mountain and we're
near the site of where we would like to relocate. The village is
down here near the river. This
river coming this way on the north side is the
Koyukuk River, and it meets up with the Yukon River.
When we have flooding, it jams down here
about six miles down and there's a curve in the river.
All the ice backs up all the way up to Koyukuk Inn.
The ice jams and the ice comes
backwards and it comes over the banks and it
goes into the low areas into the sloughs and
the creeks. There's some very concrete steps that communities can take
to adapt to climate change. First,
communities can get their members together and talk about what they've
seen around them, because
the things that are happening around them are the things that are likely
to become more pronounced in the future.
Koyukuk is a pretty active community.
Community members really participate in community planning meetings.
We have different ways of organizing meetings. We plan
it around dinners. If we have a particular project
identified like with the plans, we organize
committees or a working group and that seems to work
really good. Individuals within communities
can be very pivotal in getting things started within that community.
Certainly the first thing to do would be to hold a community meeting. Start
monitoring
the issues, document the issues, taking photos during
the storm season, taking photos of some of the changes that are taking place.
Communities can think about the changes they've seen,
and the sorts of risks that these changes
create for them. We're in an area of Homer that has
in the last 60 or 70 years experienced very
high erosion rates. The bluff above us here
fifty years ago would have been almost three hundred feet seaward
of where were standing right now. Just based and what we can observe
in the patterns of erosion it looks like most of the erosion here is caused by storm
energy by waves
hitting the base of these bluffs probably during big storms coming out
off the open gulf
here behind us.
The most striking impact of climate change has been the spruce bark beetle
outbreak. Starting in 1987
we went into overdrive with warm summers, and this really went through 1997.
Even though there were some cool periods in there, relatively
speaking,
the temperatures never went below average. The bark beetles were able
just to continue eating through this warm period till they had eaten
themselves out of house and home. From our tree ring investigations
we think that this run of warm summers has been the longest run the last 400
years.
When we started seeing higher temperatures back in 2002,
we were looking at temperatures that were starting to exceed 20 degrees
celsius. Twenty degrees is about 68 degrees fahrenheit,
so you'd notice that as a fisherman. You notice that that was
nice water to stand in as you are fishing. We were surprised to
see that we actually had temperatures that were that warm because that's
stressful for fish at both the egg stage
as well as when they are migrating upstream as adults.
Permafrost really has a controlling
effect on the landscape as well, and on the wetlands, because underneath
a lot of these wetlands and lakes you actually have permafrost. As
that permafrost degrades and gets deeper and deeper, what it does is it lowers the
water table,
shifting from this aquatic kind of environment to
more of a terrestrial type of environment. Within the next 50 to 100 years,
what you are going to see is a complete loss of permafrost
out here on the Delta. We don't know if a one degree
average temperature during the summer period, for example,
may give the invasive species the upper hand
on out-competing our native species. We're worried about those kinds of
issues.
Water coming from the atmosphere, acid rain basically, is also an issue that may
change the overall pH
of the surface waters where these animals are living. We've seen
several parts of our community having problems. We've seen the river mouth
erosion
from the large volume of water that goes in and then has to come back out.
The fence that surrounds the airport collapses in every storm.
We've seen the water transmission line
that's five miles north of the village exposed from
erosion. Our evacuation road was underwater in 2005.
And those are all problems that have come from
the fall storms. This is the flood gauge
for Koyukuk. It's on the washateria building.
There's different markers on the gauge
showing the level of the different facilities around town. This one is the level
of the old
bulk fuel facility at seven and a half feet. The old power plant building
is at ten and a half feet. The old airport is about
ten and a half feet. This is about the level that
water comes to right here. Well, it's affecting a lot cuz this pond right there
we're standing on,
it's a popular gathering place where
women come out and pick greens. A lot of our ponds are drying out.
You have to go out further. It
takes you know gas is expensive and not only that you can see behind me there's
hardly any snow.
A few days ago it was raining so it's affecting everything now.
Our hunting, our wood gathering, anything
that we do in the village, it's really being affected by this
global warming. Communities can think about their goals
and what they really want to maintain in their communities, and how they can
achieve these goals given the changes that are occurring around them.
People are harvesting large amounts sea mammal
and they need to have good storage as they've been able to put the
whale meat and whale blubber into the permafrost frozen ground.
Traditional underground food cellars, from a standpoint of
food security, the thawing of the ice cellars
is causing a shortage of food for many Arctic communities.
When summer time does come,
we have extremely high temperatures.
You know, the water starts evaporating and water level goes down.
To us we don't go up river when it's too shallow
to even go up to our hunting areas. So it's a year
round cycle of
misfortunes because of climate changes. Communities can begin to think about plans that they
might wish to develop
that enable them to achieve their vision
in light of the changes that are occurring. In looking for ideas
and solutions for how to adapt to climate change,
some people are conducting monitoring programs. This is an invasive tunicate right here.
What we're doing here is monitoring for
the presence of invasive tunicates. The Smithsonian Environmental Research
Center
initiated a project in which we monitor what we call settling plates underwater.
They're clean plates when we put them down and they colonize with organisms
that are floating in the marine environment here. If there are
invasive species such as the tunicates we're worried about,
then they will populate those plates. We've
found quite a few those tunicates on the plates that we've been monitoring
here.
We look at every organism, we determine the percent coverage
of the plate by each of the different types of organisms. If there is
invasive species there
such as the Botrylloides invasive tunicate that we're finding here we
take samples of those to send down to the San Francisco area.
They do DNA analysis in which they are able to identify the original source.
They are not presenting a problem on the waterfront here currently.
But we think under the conditions of warming environment, warming seawater
that they may very well become a threat to our native species of shellfish,
and especially a problem associated with the shellfish industry and the mariculture
industry
in the southern southeast region.
So we know that warm water
is stressful for fish and makes them more susceptible to predation
pollution and disease. We don't have the information
to understand how productive our watersheds are
we do a lot of looking at that movement of adult salmon
into the watershed but in most cases we don't really understand how many
of the juvenile salmon leave the system hopefully with a more regional look
at temperatures
that will help resource managers and communities focus
on where that type of research needs to happen we also focus our efforts
at streamside protection we can help reduce
the solar input into the stream by great riparian streamside vegetation.
On streams that are starting to show some stress
in terms of their water temperature, if we can improve streamside protection
for the vegetation that might help slow down the warming process in some of those
systems.
We're looking at
5 different categories of
health effects in Alaska.
First is illness both acute disease such as might occur from a food,
poisoning event, and also chronic illness, diet changes,
whether it's going to change rates of diabetes
or heart disease. We also are looking at injury rates
resulting from changes in transportation and changes in behavior.
Food safety and security, and water safety and security are also big issues.
Finally, mental health. As the environment changes.
what kinds of new stress and new obstacles
are emerging that are going to affect people's behavioral health.
Communities can think about the resources that they need
to implement their vision and work with
people both within their community and beyond their community
to find these resources and implement their goals.
Unalakleet has come up with several ideas
for adapting to the environmental changes occurring in their area.
We're encouraging migration
to the hillside you know we've all recognize that this
area down here perhaps in our lifetime may not even be down here,
and we're encouraging new development to happen up on the hillside.
You know Steve Ivanoff he has called together community meetings
where he'll come to Anchorage and he'll call people up and call representatives
from different agencies and have them sit down and talk to each other at the
table.
There's nothing to stop communities from doing this. These agencies
have a responsibility. They have to deal with these communities, so
if a community goes in asks them to come and meet
most of them are going to come and meet. We come up with a priority list.
The community has their comprehensive plan with their priority list.
The tribe has their Transportation Plan, which we created.
We conduct subcommittees to
identify all the projects that are basically on their
wants list. Once the list is completed, then we
prioritize in that order. Both the city and the tribe
had this erosion project near the river mouth as the number one priority.
And of course elevating the Beach Road West was another one
that proved to be a really good call
on the priority system. Because from the flood of 2009,
elevating the road a month before the floods
stopped a lot of water from the ocean from making it into the residences.
Sometimes these changes are just small things that you can do
in terms of just changing the time that you do things,
changing the way in which you do things, deciding the you are going to do it on
your own rather than waiting for somebody else to make it happen.
Koyukuk had a wild fire assessment done.
We were rated high by the state Division of Forestry.
We've had several fires in the area before,
and we have a lot of dry spruce
that has a potential of threatening the village. During the study we've
looked at the best place for a firebreak.
This area right here from the airport
all the way up to the rock quarry will be the
firebreak.
Adaptation to a different climate will require a shift in some aspects of
everyday life.
But some of this change could hold new opportunities.
We all want the same thing. We all want a sustainable
resource. We all want the salmon to keep coming back. We want our kids to be able
to fish for salmon. We want our grandchildren be able to fish for salmon.
You might see a shift in the species that are being targeted,
such as more utilization of whitefish or pike.
As you know maybe there are fewer subsistence opportunities for salmon.
you might see people starting to shift to other species. Here in Unalakleet and
adjacent villages in Eastern Norton Sound we've seen
higher intense storms and more frequent. The hope is
that the people will be allowed to
progress to the hillside with their own resources.
I don't believe that government's going to solve this problem for us quickly
enough.
Things are happening they're happening fast and the communities are the places
where people
see these changes. They understand these changes they understand the consequences
of these changes,
so it's a place where action by people in their own communities is going to
make the biggest difference.
Nobody is more familiar and more knowledgeable about their communities
than the people that live there. And the people that live there have a historical
perspective on change in that community. The better that they can articulate that,
the better off they are in acquiring funding to have somebody coming in
and professionally do an assessment.
We're preparing to move the village it gets worse. There's a proposal out for
a 15 mile road up a river.
After looking at what the other villages are going through,
we'd rather be prepared than do a last minute deal.
We're taking action and making efforts to
do things to help us adapt. We've got seven hundred
plus people out here that are dependent on
the decision-makers of the community to go out and
seek ways that we can save energy, for example, or
have a better home which would withstand the weather conditions that we're being
faced with, you know, with climate change occurring all around us.