Background Articles

Rising sea levels will threaten three times more people in the next 30 years than previously thought, according to the latest scientific estimates. Among the hundreds of millions of people worldwide facing the threat are the 400 residents of Newtok, Alaska. Rising river and eroding land is pushing the entire community to relocate, despite emotional and logistical hurdles.

A recent report compiled by the Army Corps of Engineers and researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks documents erosion and other environmental threats facing communities in rural Alaska.

For half a century, Taku had been the one known Alaskan glacier to withstand the effects of climate change – until now.

Moving Newtok residents to the new village of Mertarvik has been planned for decades. This month, several families moved into new homes.

For decades, efforts have been underway to tame the effects of erosion on the Magdalen Islands, an archipelago in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. But the effects of climate change left these tiny islands vulnerable when it came to facing two powerful and unpredictable storms in less than a year.

For more than a century farmers in California's Central Valley have been pumping water out of the ground — so much so that the land is slowly sinking, a process known as subsidence. In fewer than 100 years, it's dropped 8½ metres.

The Coast Guard ordered the Lower Kuskokwim School District to empty the tanks to prevent an environmental disaster as the eroding Kuskokwim riverbank advanced towards the fuel site.

Somewhere between the size of a sewer rat and a beaver, with a tail resembling that of an opossum and protruding, nacho cheese-colored teeth, the nutria is both impressively unattractive and highly destructive.

Record-breaking temperatures are nothing new for Norwegian glaciers. If temperatures become warmer, more glaciers may disappear.

A city council member estimated the Western Alaska village has lost about 20 feet of riverbank since May.

Akiak lost a mile-long stretch of riverbank to erosion last month. Six houses are now within 100 feet of the riverbank and need to be moved as soon as possible, but some people don’t want to move.

In Western Alaska, accelerating erosion is forcing several villages to consider moving. In Quinhagak, a village on the Bering Sea, erosion is threatening the sewer lagoon and the building that houses its washeteria and health clinic.

As government officials look for money for a study, university professors working with students say there’s plenty of data available — and little time to lose.

The Homer Spit’s future as an iconic tourist attraction is in danger of washing away. Erosion along the spit’s sea walls is not a new problem. City officials are working with state and federal agencies to find a lasting solution.

Extreme erosion of Arctic coastlines in a changing climate—up to a metre a day—has been revealed with drone surveys.

In the Eureka Sound Lowlands on Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg islands, the permafrost is more than half a kilometre deep, and the average air temperature is –19.7 C. But higher summer temperatures have caused the earth to collapse.

Indigenous Australians from low-lying islands in the Torres Strait argue that the government, by failing to act on climate change, has violated their fundamental right to maintain their culture.

Climate change has caused a 60-fold increase in active landslides on one Canadian Arctic island.

Increasing ground temperatures in the Arctic are indicators of global climate change, but until recently, areas of cold permafrost were thought to be relatively immune to severe impacts. A new study by Antoni Lewkowicz, a professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Ottawa and published in the journal Nature Communications, however, shows that areas of cold permafrost can be vulnerable to rising summer temperatures.

Last year's drought summer resulted in halved grass crops in Eastern Norway compared to the previous year, according to recent figures from Statistics Norway. - The consequences of the drought continue to affect the daily lives of many farmers, says Lars Petter Bartnes, leader of the Norwegian Farmers' Union.