The Village Is Moving, and Nobody Is In Charge of Moving It

Sea ice used to armour Alaska's western coast through the storm season; without it, waves reach shorelines whose permafrost is thawing into mud, and villages lose metres of ground a year. At least twelve Alaska Native villages have decided to relocate, some more than twenty years ago, and most remain stuck: no single federal agency is responsible for moving a community, so funding must be assembled programme by programme, and places like Newtok end up split between two sites at once. The Alaska Institute for Justice runs the Alaska Climate Justice Program with tribes facing this, building community-led relocation and adaptation plans rather than waiting for a mechanism that does not exist. In 2020 it took the argument outside the country, filing a complaint with ten UN Special Rapporteurs on behalf of five tribes, framing climate-forced displacement as an ongoing human rights violation.