Rural Alaskans who face worsening climate conditions — from sea-level rise to melting permafrost — often don’t leave their homes for safer, more urbanized areas, according to newly published research from Pennsylvania State University.
Rather, such communities are more likely to adapt in place. For a handful, that means making hard choices about physically moving homes, buildings and infrastructure to secure ground nearby. But that costly option may not be available to many small, indigenous Arctic communities, which are among the most climate vulnerable in the world.
“Community relocation from climate-related environmental changes is a possible option in Alaska, but it is an unpopular and expensive process,” said Guangqing Chi, a professor of rural sociology, demography and public health sciences at Penn State and lead author of the paper published in the journal Regional Environmental Change.
The issue is not unique to Alaska. It is playing out in climate-threatened communities around the United States, from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, the ancestral home to the Gullah/Geechee Nation, to Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, where members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe lived for two centuries before their island succumbed to storm surges and rising seas. Today, most former Isle de Jean Charles residents have moved to a new community 40 miles inland.