After a remnant typhoon hammered Indigenous communities in Western Alaska last month, the state's elected leaders have been fielding questions about how to protect the region that faces growing threats from storms as the climate warms.

At a news conference in late October, Gov. Mike Dunleavy answered the question with one of his own.

"It's a complex question to get the answers to. Not only: What do you do to make a community prepared for the future? But: Where do you get the money and how do you do that?" he said.

In fact, that question had already been answered, in a report released a year earlier.

The 200-page document was published by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium with contributions from Dunleavy's own administration. And it contains both detailed recommendations to boost village efforts to protect themselves, as well as a specific request for cash from the U.S. Congress: filling an estimated $80 million-a-year funding gap, with money prioritized based on the severity of communities' environmental threats.

Others have floated different ideas about where the money should come from, including a tax on Alaska's oil companies.

But it's clear that bigger budgets are needed to meet the need, and that the damage that occurred last month is evidence of failure by both the state and federal governments, according to Charitie Ropati, a Yup'ik climate advocate with roots in Western Alaska.

"We have incredible, capable leaders in our villages — incredible youth from those communities who have the capacity and the knowledge to lead," said Ropati. "The issue is that the funding needs to get into their hands."

Scientists say Western Alaska's villages are increasingly vulnerable to events like last month's storm amid a changing climate, and will have to either better protect themselves against floodwaters or relocate entirely. It could cost $4.3 billion to protect infrastructure in Alaska's threatened communities over the next half-century, according to a 2020 estimate cited in the consortium's report.

While the damage and destruction from the recent storm were painful to experience, some advocates and community leaders are now describing them as a wakeup call — one that could help focus attention, and public money, on a problem that they say has failed to draw an adequate government response so far.

"The time for climate commissions and committees and reports and things like that has come and gone," said Rick Steiner, an Anchorage-based advocate who's long pushed Alaska lawmakers to take stronger action in response to climate change. "What we need is tens of millions of dollars available for these communities to do what they know they need to do — to either stay, or pick up and leave and relocate."

State and federal policymakers have long identified coastal erosion, flooding and permafrost thaw as major problems in Alaska. U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens hosted a hearing in 2004 where tribal leaders warned of government inaction and a lack of coordination between state and federal agencies.

Two decades later, the tribal consortium's report suggests that little has changed.

Indigenous villages along Alaska's coasts — with tight budgets, overburdened staff and spotty internet — still struggle to access government programs for relocation or protection. Federal support remains fragmented and inadequate, the report found.

Raising the money required to relocate Newtok, a single Yup'ik village near the Bering Sea coast, required more than more than a decade of effort and more than 40 grants from 35 separate state, federal and nongovernmental sources, the report said. The cost of that project is now estimated to exceed $150 million, according to ProPublica.

Other villages have been unable to make use of government programs because of local cost-sharing requirements they can't meet, caps on grant sizes and wariness by agencies to fund protection projects when villages are also making long-term plans to move.

"Trying to navigate all potential government programs to address environmental threats can be like trying to assemble a 10,000-piece puzzle without a picture printed on the pieces," the report said.

None of the three members of the state's congressional delegation agreed to an interview about the long-term outlook for protecting Western Alaska's villages.

A spokesperson for U.S. Rep. Nick Begich declined a request.

A spokesperson for U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan pointed to a recent address the senator made at the Alaska Federation of Natives' annual convention, where he touted tens of millions of dollars that the delegation had secured in various bills to fight environmental threats. He also endorsed an idea from a Western Alaska tribal group, the Association of Village Council Presidents, to create a regional emergency response center.

"We think this is a really good idea and we're looking into it," he said, while also acknowledging, "We have more work to do."

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, in a prepared statement, said she could understand "why many feel they were failed by their government." She pointed to a decision by the Trump administration earlier this year to revoke a $20 million grant for erosion control for the tribal government in Kipnuk — the Western Alaska village hit hardest by the recent storm, with nearly all of its buildings destroyed.

Murkowski said she's been working with the tribal health consortium "to ensure that any new framework truly reflects the needs of Alaska and our diverse communities, with a strong focus on mitigation and long-term resilience." After the storm, she said she spoke on the U.S. Senate floor "to remind my colleagues that our role in Congress is to provide protection and infrastructure to communities that cannot shoulder these challenges alone."

"Every single displaced person is an American whom we have a responsibility to support," she said. "Not only in the aftermath of a disaster, but by ensuring that the next 'once-in-a-generation' storm doesn't tear another community apart."

'A recipe for disaster'

Advocates point out that the low-lying locations of many Alaska villages can be traced back to the era of early colonization. At the time, Native people were drawn from more adaptable, seasonal settlements to permanent communities near schools run by the federal government or religious missions.

That history creates an obligation for the federal government to assist threatened Indigenous communities today, said Ropati.

"There needs to be some type of monetary reparations for what we're seeing in our region. We didn't choose to live in these flood-prone areas," Ropati said. "Our children were forced to go to these schools, and it leads to realities like this."

The tribal consortium's report says that statewide, more than 140 Alaska Native communities face "some degree of infrastructure damage" from erosion, flooding and permafrost thaw.

The settlements in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta that were pummeled last month are among the most vulnerable. The region, a flat plain at the edge of the Bering Sea, faces an array of interconnected environmental threats stemming from climate change, according to scientists.

Sea level rise alone will cause monthly flooding in the delta within a few decades, and 10 of the 18 outermost villages face relocation, according to another major scientific study published earlier this year with federal, tribal and academic contributors.

"You throw on the permafrost collapsing and reducing the height of these plateaus these villages are built on, and it's a recipe for disaster that just can't be ignored," Torre Jorgenson, a Fairbanks-based landscape ecologist who worked on the study, said in an interview. But, he said: "The magnitude of the problem and the magnitude of the costs are such that our institutions just can't adequately grapple with it."

The tribal consortium's report, meanwhile, lays out three basic options for threatened communities.

They can better protect infrastructure in existing locations by building up shorelines, improving drainage and elevating buildings above flood levels. Where that's not possible, villages can build new infrastructure at nearby sites, or move existing infrastructure there, in what's known as a "managed retreat."

Full relocation is a last resort.

All of those options are costly, and the report contains a litany of obstacles to communities raising the necessary cash.

Villages often have a small, overworked staff that's mismatched to the huge amount of work that goes into grant writing and community decision-making around relocation, the report says.

Federal programs, meanwhile, prioritize grants to communities that can show they have bigger staff capacity. Some programs won't fund larger regional or statewide partners that typically have the technical expertise to assist smaller villages with resilience and relocation projects, the report says.

"We should not (have to) be writing grants to protect our communities," the report quotes one Nome-based tribal leader, Melanie Bahnke, as saying.

'We know what the science says'

Meanwhile, Steiner, the Anchorage advocate, is pushing Alaska's state government to take a more active role in supporting communities threatened by climate change.

The state's commitment to that task has fluctuated over the years. After a fall storm that forced the evacuation of the Northwest Alaska village of Kivalina in 2007, former Gov. Sarah Palin created a climate change team. But the administration of her successor, Sean Parnell, disbanded a key working group that was part of that effort, the consortium's report said.

Parnell's successor, Bill Walker, established his own climate leadership team after more than two years in office, and his successor, Mike Dunleavy, abolished the group in 2019.

Steiner is now calling on Alaska leaders to convene a "climate disaster summit" in the next few months, where participants could draft a five-year plan to protect the state's communities for the next century.

"We know what the science says. We know what the forecasts are. This is going to keep happening," Steiner said. "The real tragedy of Halong would be if we fail to look forward and apply the lessons, prepare for the next storm and the next storm."

Steiner also wants lawmakers to levy a 20-cents-per-barrel tax on Alaska's oil industry to help pay for needed projects — a proposal he's been pushing for decades that could generate some $35 million a year.

State leaders haven't formally endorsed Steiner's ideas. But they have expressed a degree of openness to longer-term planning for storms and other natural disasters expected to hit Alaska with increasing frequency.

"We're trying to find the money to do these sorts of things, and it's very important," state Senate President Gary Stevens of Kodiak said in a brief recent phone interview. But, he added, "we've got limited funds."

Bryce Edgmon of Dillingham, the House speaker, said it's premature to comment on Steiner's specific proposals. But he added that state policymakers do need to put a greater emphasis on planning for disaster management — particularly given the increasing likelihood of damaging storms in the future.

A spokesperson for Dunleavy did not respond to questions about Steiner's ideas.

Ropati, the Yup'ik climate advocate, said the widespread damage caused by the most recent storm is evidence the state and federal governments are "failing" communities like hers, "and have historically failed our people," she said.

She pointed out that some of the evacuees from the region's hardest-hit villages may be forced to permanently resettle in urban Alaska communities, severing their ties to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and its subsistence traditions.

Averting those kinds of outcomes will require help from outside the region, Ropati said. But the work needs to happen in a way that "upholds our rights as Indigenous people."

"We need everyone to work together," she said. "And to do it in a way where communities on the front lines have the autonomy to make the decisions."

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