Newtok to Mertarvik: How an entire village is being evicted by climate change.

• Author: Simonelli, Isaac Stone
• Position: CONSTRUCTION SPECIAL SECTION / COMMUNITY PLANNING

In October, the Yup'ik community of Newtok braced itself to lose four homes to rapid erosion as storms from the southeast removed dozens of feet of shoreline no longer protected by ice and permafrost due to climate change. During a three-day storm at the beginning of October, twenty feet of shoreline was lost, putting the closest homes within twenty-five feet of the Ningliq River.

"With these October storms and as the rate of erosion grows, the consensus feeling within the community is worried; those closest to the erosion feel the anxiety most, as they witness the effects on a day-to-day basis," says Andrew John, the Newtok Village Tribal Administrator. "Nearly the entire community feels on edge. I know [I] have had a lot of sleepless nights.

"We as a community have no time for debate over climate change anymore. It's here: we see it, live it, and currently with these storms that we are having right now, we feel the direct impacts of it."

Since 1994 the village of about 400 people nestled between the Ningliq River and Newtok River has been working toward fleeing the slow-moving disaster zone, acquiring a new site, Mertarvik (on Nelson Island) in a land trade with the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 2003.

Developing the new site, putting in basic modern infrastructure--running water, power, sewers--is an incredibly costly endeavor made even more difficult by the limited resources and commerce within the community.

"Newtok is an incredibly traditional Yup'ik subsistence community," says Gavin Dixon, community development manager at Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC), which signed a resolution with the Newtok Village Council earlier this year to become the overall manager of the relocation project. "They spend a lot of time gathering their own food and taking care of themselves."

There are few paying jobs in Newtok. Available local positions include commercial fishing, seasonal firefighting, and government jobs at the local health clinic, schools, and tribal government, Dixon explains.

Slow-moving Disaster

"There's a limited economy, and that's the case in most of these rural villages... Some villages have a big fishing industry or a local mine nearby or forestry or something that gives them a tax base," Dixon says. "And Newtok doesn't really have that. That makes it hard to fund a lot of these efforts. The village can't save up the amount of money that's needed to build all this infrastructure; they need the support."

With no single source of funding for the project, Newtok has needed to navigate various bureaucratic systems at the state and federal level to identify grants and other sources of funding for individual projects associated with the move. One grant through the Bureau of Indian Affairs helps to build a couple hundred feet of road per year, and a small grant from USDA Rural Development paid for the investigation into establishing a clean water source at the new site.

"The State of Alaska has been an early investor in the community through legislature and general obligation bonds. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, primarily through their 638 contracting program and their Tribal Transportation program, has been incredibly flexible and supportive in the relocation. And, then, the largest single funder has been the Denali Commission," Dixon says.

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