A Native American village in the USA state of Alaska was poised on Wednesday to decide whether to relocate its entire population of some 600 people due to the threat of rising seas.
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Unofficial ballot returns show a majority of voters in one of Alaska’s most eroded communities want to move to safer ground from their tiny island home. Melting sea ice is raising ocean levels and will submerge the island in a few decades. She says that count does not include absentee or special needs ballots.
The unofficial vote count Wednesday was 89 in favor of moving and 78 voting to stay, the city clerk told the Associated Press. The city clerk said the community will decide at a later point where to move to, but it would likely be on the nearby mainland. The town is built on permafrost, which is melting and causing the shore to become even more vulnerable to crashing waves. Barricades and sea walls have had little effect.
“To put this in perspective: I was born in 1997, and since then, Shishmaref has lost about 100 feet”, he added. “In the past 15 years, we had to move 13 houses – including my dear grandma Edna’s house – from one end of the island to the other because of this loss of land”.
He warned that within two decades the whole island will erode away completely.
Sinnok, who is an Arctic Youth Ambassador, attended the United Nations Cop21 in Paris in 2015, where a global treaty was signed by 195 nations in an effort to combat climate change, and discussed how warmer temperatures are affecting the Arctic more than other places of the world.
Shishmaref is far from the only village facing this problem, as a study from the U.S. Government Accountability Office has found that at least 31 Alaskan villages are threatened by global warming.
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The village of Newtok, about 370 miles south of Shishmaref, has already voted to move using state and federal funds from HUD, spokeswoman Maria Gonoa said.
