A recent Canadian study, undertaken by York University and the University of Saskatchewan, studied climate resilience among northern fish species with some surprising results. Northern fish are, by nature, remarkably resilient, adjusting to a range of conditions including short summers with 24-hours of daylight and abundant food followed by long dark winters with little or no food availability. But as streams warm, prompting an increase in the invertebrates on which salmon feed, salmon species are tending to grow faster and have greater reproductive success. That’s the surprise, and could be a boon to indigenous communities, especially as salmon expand their ranges further north. But for some fish, mainly dolly Varden and Arctic grayling, which are specialized to thrive in cold Arctic waters, there may be no adaption or migration option at hand as rivers warm and summers grow longer.
In August 2020, National Public Radio’s Ted Talk broadcast an episode entitled “Our Relationship with Water” in which Colette Pichon Battle who is an attorney turned climate activist who grew up in Bayou Liberty just north of New Orleans.[1] She says she was thrown into her new role because rising sea levels, flooding and other climate factors are threatening the land that has been in her family for generations. Pichon-Battle says “’I work at the community level to make sure that black folks, poor folks and native folks are part of thia climate conversation’” including to communicate the policy and science of climate change to her neighbors and that the scientific community and policy makers listen to the traditional knowledge that the community can provide about the area.[2]
After Hurrican Katrina caused a tidal surge from the Gulf that swept her entire community into Lake Pontchartrain, she found that the surge was caused by sea level rise and the absence of barrier islands, now gone because of oil and gas drilling, which use to block such surges. Once she realized that hurricans like Katrina and likely worse are her to stay and in looking at flood maps of Lousiana she realized that her community along with other African American, Native American and impoverished communities would likely simply disappear before the end of the century. Quechon-Battle, notes that she was invited to the Whitehouse during the Obama administration to talk with the Federal Emergency Management Service, the agency primarily responsible for assisting communities with disaster and hazard mitigation preparedness in relation to flooding and other natural events, about how her community could obtain assistance to prepare for future flooding events. She says that during this conversation “the FEMA administrator said ‘I understand what your saying, but the FEMA regulations are’nt ment for the most vulnerable communities.’ The disaster assistance process for this country are ment for the middle class.” Despite the double take she made when she heard this statement she firmly believes that “This was an honest comment from FEMA. This is what you realize when you recognize that you recognize that the structures that are in place right now are absolutely not meant for me.”[3]
Arctic Native communities which have been experiencing increased permafrost melt, loss of sea ice, extreme weather events, flooding and erosion that may make current residences and settlements uninhabitable in the near future, no all to well about competition for limited federal disaster and hazard mitigation funding to defend against the inevitable march of climate change. In addition to what communities like Quechon-Battle’s experienced when approaching FEMA for help, in many cases, agencies require cost-benefit analysis, plans, environmental analysis, or other measures above and beyond analysis or strategies contained in Hazard Mitigation Plans (HMPs) or other plans before such communities qualify to apply for funds. Similarly, because standard arctic community HMPs do not contain a detailed cost-benefit analysis of natural hazards affecting water resources, such communities cannot obtain high rankings that larger cities can to qualify for competitive funding or other federal or state assistance needed to address such impacts. Finally, the villages cannot afford to hire consultants or even staff to conduct climate adaption planning on behalf of such communities to include more meaningful consideration of economic impacts and risks associated with coastal water resource management resiliency strategies, in order to move beyond the planning phase and into on the ground project implementation.
There is a need, therefore, to conduct economic risk-benefit and environmental analysis and otherwise close the gap between Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other governmental funding and technical assistance programs such so that North Bering Sea communities can implement on-the-ground projects that will address the Villages’ climate-related coastal water resources management challenges.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Federal Subsistence Management Program will continue conducting a water temperature monitoring project for the next two summers at rivers and streams throughout Alaska. This effort is associated with fisheries monitoring projects funded through the Fisheries Resource Monitoring Program (Program), and has been ongoing since 2008. According to the Program, temperature can impact fish through changes in metabolic rate, primary production, respiration, growth, decomposition, water chemistry, migration timing and susceptibility to disease. At the same time “[d]evelopment adjacent to stream habitats…as well as changes in climate can potentially cause fluctuations in water temperature beyond the behavioral and physiological tolerance of aquatic organisms, including fish, that could have a deleterious effect on their productivity and availability to subsistence users.”
Federal, State, and Tribal organizations in Alaska are currently collecting water temperature data for such subsistence streams. The Program is looking to highlight the importance of uniform data collection, standardization, and reporting, to ensure that such data is reliable for monitoring climate change and supporting conservation actions.
The Alaska Online Aquatic Temperature Site (AKOATS) platform, hosted by the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Alaska Center for Conservation Science, is currently used to make this data available to the public. The platform was developed with the idea that it would serve as a centralized location to access stream temperature monitoring data collection across Alaska.
Scientists from multiple agencies, working collaboratively to supply data to the Arctic Integrated Ecosystem Research Program, are detecting rapid changes in the Bering and Chukchi Seas. These changes are driven by abnormally high water temperatures and rapid loss of sea ice (on par with climate predictions for 2040), and include high numbers of Pacific cod and pollock expanding into Arctic waters, higher concentrations of harmful algal blooms, and a sea bird die-off that began in 2014 impacting puffins, common murre and, most recently, short-tailed shearwaters. At the base of the food web, larger, high-fat copepods are declining while smaller, copepods with a lower-fat content are flourishing. This means less nutrition for Arctic cod, while, at the same time, more competition for these resources as pollock expand their range northward.
But these troubling changes are not limited to northern ocean waters. Inland, freshwater rivers in the Arctic are overheating. Record-warm temperatures in July, 2019 caused heat stress and a mass die-off in returning, pre-spawned salmon. Read more.
The report also highlights coexistence of forests, wildlife and local communities is highlighted to provide the perspective of local communities of the impacts of climate change and extraction industries especially mining. Such development leads to loss of forest cover, depletion of groundwater, increase in net-carbon emissions, changes in local weather patterns, loss of traditional tribal livelihoods and a collapse of various plant and animal species—all in the name of ‘development’.
The report show cases the case of Devi, India in which twenty year earlier, locals took the lead in returning health back to forest ecosystem after mining activity devastated the area. This included groups of mostly women who get up early in the morning to patrol forests in groups and digging pools and making mud dams to conserve water. Now a fully recovered forest with abundant resources including a steady supply of food and water, which has resulted in the return of the animals.
According to the report, “[t]hese natural resource dependent communities are among the poorest of the poor.” “They have not had a single day of formal education. And yet they have been the ones protecting this 200-hectare forest for the past twenty years or so.”
Similarly, Last month Hannah Panci from the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission spoke at Lawrence University as part of the Spoerl Lecture Series, about climate impact and preparedness. Specifically, Panci discussed working with almost a dozen local Native American tribes, to develop a climate vulnerability assessment which combines both scientific research and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in order to create a vulnerability score for different species on tribal lands.
The organization gathers TEK by visiting the various communities, which include members that still make their living off hunting, gathering and fishing, and interviewing community these members about changes they are noticing about fish and wildlife they use for subsistence. Through this process, important information about traditions that have been passed down for generations and which species are the most important to the tribes. According to Panci, two of the main ones are wild rice and walleye, but there are 11 primary species that tribal members are concerned about.
The Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission then applies this information to determine what impacts climate change is having on these species and apply current scientific data to create maps of the region where such impacts are occurring and apply protection measures. By combining conventional science and local knowledge of locals is the best possible means for assisting tribal communities in the Great Lakes to prepare for climate change.
Finally, during a recent event at UC Davis in March 12, professor Beth Rose Middleton who is chair of the Native American Studies Department and Fellow at the John Muir Institute of the Environment, discussed “Tribal Leadership in Climate Change Adaptation.” Professor Middleton discussed the leadership in environmental policy and planning provided by California Indian nations in traditional including land stewardship and interventions in state, national and international policy. Middleton’s research includes Native land trusts, Native-led conservation land acquisitions, tribal participation in the carbon credit market and the importance of re-introducing traditional fire management.
Alaska Native village communities located on the Seward Peninsula region (Villages) rely on healthy watersheds, fish and wildlife for their subsistence needs. At the same time rising temperatures and low snow pack in the region are reeking havoc on the delivery of water when it is most needed. For example, air temperatures in the region, which are rising twice as fast as other places in the country, broke records during the month of July 2019.
These temperature increases are impacting the subsistence livelihoods of the Villages through decreased dissolved oxygen combined with other weather related changes, including low river flows, altered ice flows, and stream bank erosion. In addition, because rivers and streams located within the Western Alaska region are largely fed by snow melt, rising temperatures in the region means rain (instead of snow) is becoming more prominent in the fall and winter. This is resulting in increased seasonal flood events which threaten community infrastructure and scour stream beds used by fish and wildlife.
These sudden changes are impacting fresh water ecosystems during the summer months as well. In 2019 about 22 rivers and streams throughout Alaska reported record water temperatures, as compared to just 7 in 2018. As a result, in June and July 2019, thousands of salmon died as they migrated to spawning grounds in Western Alaska, because the water temperatures exceeded lethal limits for the fish. For example, the Tubulik near Elim and Koyuk had record temperatures as high as 16 degrees centigrad at the Vulcan Creek gage site, 30 miles from the mouth.
These climate related stressors are further exacerbated by non-climate stressors including mining and related development on fish and wildlife populations. Specifically, during 2020, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management will be opening over 46 million acres in 1-3 million acres increments, to mining and other development throughout Alaska. As part of this process, the agency plans to open about 3 million acres covered by the Kobuk-Seward Resource Management Plan (Plan) of BLM Alaska land mineral entry and remove community-supported Areas of Critical Environmental Concern. The Plan, however, does not address the impacts of increasing water temperatures in watersheds affected by land releases and therefore, the combined impacts of climate change and mining development on subsistence resources.
The Native Village of Elim is applying for funding for it’s Tubutulik River Temperature, Dissolved Oxygen (DO) and Stream Flow Monitoring Plan Project is working to develop a climate change risk assessment for the Tubutulik River Watershed (Watershed) that will include: 1) Application of drought and temperature forecasting for the Seward Penninsula to predict instream flows and temperature; 2) Protocols for collection of instream flow, temperature and dissolved oxygen data during the summer season when temperatures are at their highest; 3) Identify lands within the Watershed that include critical fish habitat and potential locateable minerals that have been opened for mining under the Kobuk-Seward Peninsula Resource Management Plan (RMP); 4) Identify a process for applying the modeling and data collected to assist policy makers and land managers to mitigate land uses that potentially exacerbate climate related impacts in the Watershed and 5) Apply for instream flow water rights under Alaska state law on stream reaches in sensitive watersheds that have been open to mining activity.
Once the Assessment is completed, it will serve as an ecosystem-wide vulnerability assessment for natural resource(s) that can be used by multiple tribes as a template for conducting their own modeling, data collection and outreach to federal and state agency land managers. There are multiple sensitive salmon streams and rivers within the RMP planning area that other tribes rely on for subsistence practices that will be impacted by the opening of lands to mining under the RMP. The Assessment will, therefore, specifically benefit the other Village communities located on the Seward Peninsula by assisting in the prediction of instream flows and temperature impacts to salmon and other fisheries, and measures that will result in quantifiable, locally based watershed protection from the potential impacts of climate change and land development.
Permafrost, which consists of frozen soil, acts like a pond liner, retaining snowmelt and rainfall at the surface. As permafrost thaws, pathways for drainage are created and ponds and lakes diminish in size or drain away all together. In a study by the National Park Service, aerial photos of Alaska’s arctic park lands between 1984 and 2018 indicate significant drainage following years with unusually warm temperatures. Moreover, the rate of lake loss appears to be accelerating. The loss of arctic lakes is impacting area wildlife, including millions of nesting waterfowl that depend on these habitats. The yellow-billed loon is of particular concern, as half of the world’s population of just 10,000 birds spends the summer in the Alaskan arctic, foraging for fish in deeper waters and nesting at the water’s edge.
For more information see: https://www.nps.gov/articles/lostarcticlakes.htm
In total, the Arctic research salmon program estimates that in 2019 roughly 2,000 salmon samples have been provided to them – almost triple the number from 19 years of monitoring harvesters and this number appears to be rising.
Similarly, Pink salmon have spread to parts of northern Europe after being released into rivers in Russia in the 1960s. Unprecedented numbers of the fish were found in Scottish rivers in 2017 and they were seen again in 2019 on the Dee which flows through Aberdeenshire, the Tweed which passes through the Borders, Kyle of Sutherland which is an estuary in the east Highlands and the River Ness which flows through Inverness and into Loch Ness when in September, a lone male was captured on one of our underwater surveillance cameras.”
Alaska is also on the front lines of climate change where July 2019 set a record for the state’s hottest month on record. Scorching temperatures illustrate that not only, are humans, for better or worse, making history but because sea ice in the Arctic is critical to life, we are witnesses to the first visible signs of a collapsing arctic ecosystem including gray whale, ice seal, salmon and reindeer die-offs.
While walrus, sometimes congregating in the tens of thousands, they have been hauling out on the beach at Point Lay, Alaska almost every year since 2007, due to the disappearance of their usual sea ice habitat. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, thousands of walruses hauled out on the beach in late July – the earliest ever. The walrus congregations can number in the tens of thousands, with up to 40,000 animals estimated at a time.
My wife Jessica and I spent a weekend last July in Hope, Alaska in order to get away from computers for a couple of days and enjoy one of our favorite escapes in one of the most picturesque places in the state. As we set up camp, we were alarmed by the number of birch trees with brown leaves. Weeks of drought due to a high pressure system that’s brought record-breaking heat has deflect storm systems farther north, preventing rainfall throughout the Kenai Peninsula and drying out the plant life. During a couple of hikes along the trails outside the campground it was evident that not only the trees had been affected. Fern, Devils club, fire weed and other plants were shriveled and dying.
While extreme drought is commonplace these days in the lower 48, the phenomenon has been all but unheard-of in Alaska…until this summer. For the second month in a row, at our house, we have been rationing water due to weeks without rain and increasingly diminishing re-charge of a shared well. The drought is similarly affecting Southcentral Alaskan communities that rely on snow pack and rain water for water.
According to a recent article in the Anchorage Daily News, entire forests in Southeast “are falling prey to spruce bark beetles and hemlock sawflys, which are taking advantage of a lack of rainfall and higher than average temperatures.” Similarly, while dry weather has also forced cuts in hydropower production in South central Alaska, an atmospheric river, consisting of a deluge of rain water from the tropical Pacific Ocean, has been drenching northern sections of Alaska and similarly disrupting hydropower and other infrastructure in that area.
In early July, I headed out with a research team from the Native Village of Elim to the Vulcan Creek gage site (30 miles up the Tubutulik River in Western Alaska) to install a new Level & Barrow Logger which collect stream depth and temperature continuously to re-place damaged equipment from a couple of years earlier. There was a pressing need to install the new equipment because we had heard reports just a few days previously of large salmon die-offs in the Shaktoolik and Unalakleet due to temperatures reported to be as high as 70 – 90°F and lower water levels, most likely resulting in low dissolved oxygen in shallow sections of rivers and the suffocation of fish.
As expected, while traveling to the stream flow measuring Gage Site the River, we observed hundreds of otherwise healthy (not spawned-out) dead fish including Pink and Chum salmon and white fish. When we got to the gage site we took temperature and dissolved oxygen (DO) readings indicating the water was between 61– 64 degrees and DO as low as 8 milligrams per liter (a healthy stream should be 9 milligrams per liter or higher) When we returned to the gage site a few weeks later, we collected more data that showed temperature stayed high (around 58-60 degrees for the next several days before dropping down to a more normal 54 degrees.
Wes Jones, Development Director for Research with the Norton Sound Economic Development Corporation’s Fisheries says the scope of the “larger than normal salmon die-off last month covered several communities from east to west in the Norton Sound region” including Kotlik, Elim, Unalakleet, Shaktoolik, Golovin, Kotlik, Alakanuk and Akyak. Jones says that although salmon die-offs often occur naturally, “for this many to die so early in the spawning season could be a tipping point indicating a larger ecosystem shift in the Norton Sound region as a result of warming waters.”
Salmon streams in the Norton Sound region, however, were not the only ones affected by Alaska’s summer of 2019 heat wave. In early July, temperatures over 81 F were recorded in southcentral Alaska. This resulted, in salmon spawning stream temperatures exceeding 80 degrees for the first time ever. One such river – the Deshka produces more than 20% of the chinook escapements for the Susitna River watershed which drains the Alaskan Mountain Range.
Other rivers on the Kenai Peninsula similarly set temperature records in July. The Anchor River, for example, was recorded at 73 degrees. For spawning adult salmon or growing juvenile, temperatures above 80 degrees can be lethal, primarily due to the loss of oxygen in the water and the fact that warm water makes fish lethargic and, therefore, susceptible to predation. High temperatures and drought conditions combined with low snow pack this summer, caused the Jackoloff River on the other side of Kachemak Bay from my home to dry up completely for the second time in four yours, resulting in a die-off of Pink salmon returning to spawn and Silver smolts trapped in rapidly diminishing pools of water.
In short, it’s time to stop sugar coating it and accept the fact that Alaska’s freshwater ecosystems are collapsing – and it’s our carbon addicted society that’s causing it. According to Peter Westley, assistant professor of fisheries conservation and fisheries ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the state’s fish die-off is “directly in line with the predictions of what scientists…have been warning is likely to occur, and we need to prepare ourselves and not be surprised when it happens again in the future, because it will.” Only problem, according to Sue Mauger, Science Director with Cook Inlete Keeper, is that “We’re 50 years ahead of where we thought they would be.”
We should realize that we probably cannot stop the freshwater habitat collapse from occurring but maybe we can slow it down. One strategy comes from Stephanie Quinn-Davison, Director ofthe Yukon River Inter-Tribal fish commission. who suggests initiating a network of locals from native village communities to monitor temperature, low flows, dissolved oxygen in nearby rivers to try and anticipate salmon die-offs before they occur. Similarly, calling it a “water emergency” for south central Alaska, the Leo Network is tracking impacts from the regional drought and request that Network members post observation to the website. Finally, Michael Ophiem with the Seldovia Village Tribe says that they have begun identifying habitat in the Jackaloff Creek watershed were water levels and temperature are currently adequate for salmon spawning and plan to purchase a wet incubator for out-planting eggs to those areas.
For our part, WPC will continue to assist with salmon die-off monitoring by collecting more data on water temperature, dissolved oxygen and flow levels for several villages in the Norton Sound Region this summer and next. Also, we would like to work with federal, state city and/or tribal governments, conservation organizations and other stakeholder located to develop rapid assessment capability and understanding watershed responses to extreme events including heavy precipitation and drought conditions. If you need assistance with stream monitoring or are interested in participating in the rapid assessment efforts please contact WPC at hal@waterpolicyconsulting.com or (907)491-1355.
