A number of Alaska Native villages have been impacted so severely by sea-level rise and other climate-induced threats, they have decided to relocate.
But there is no U.S. agency designated to help pay for and implement an entire community’s move. Robin Bronen, a senior scientist with The Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska, says that’s a huge problem. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, she explains that because there is no government process to facilitate such relocations, none of these villages have been able to move, despite their resolve to do so. And in a bureaucratic Catch-22, these communities no longer receive the infrastructure repair funds they were once entitled to. Pointing to future sea level rise along U.S. coasts, Bronen says that “if we don’t figure out how to create this relocation institutional framework, we’re talking about humanitarian crises for millions of people living in the United States.”
Read the interview.
Robin Bronen
Read the interview.