Communities across the Kodiak Archipelago are facing environmental challenges that climate change is making worse — problems like coastal erosion, depleted salmon spawning grounds and disrupted wildlife populations. A recent workshop in Kodiak connected some rural communities to resources that could help them adapt to those challenges.
Akhiok is on the southern end of Kodiak Island, and like many of Alaska’s coastal communities, Akhiok is seeing growing threats from erosion along its coast. Teacon Simeonoff with the Native Village of Akhiok said the community’s water revetment, which helps stabilize river banks and prevent erosion, failed years ago. That significant washout has partially exposed the community’s water and sewer system to the elements.
But he said it’s been hard to find the resources to fix it. The only way to get supplies to the community of about 60 people is by boat or plane.
“Funding and location is our biggest challenge because we’re so far from a usable source of material, and the cost of bringing all that stuff down there, is our biggest hurdle,” Simeonoff said.
Ahkiok is waiting on an assessment report from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers so that it can go after specific grants to repair its revetment. The Native Village of Akhiok hopes to apply for and secure grant funding to protect its community from further erosion in the coming year.
Coastal erosion isn’t a new problem in Akhiok — some roads and parts of the airstrip have been slowly eroding for years. But Simeonoff said that as stronger and more frequent storms threaten his community, they need a fix sooner rather than later. Simeonoff shared that in some cases, powerful storm surges are reaching water levels of roughly 12 feet and splashing onto some residents’ homes.
That’s what brought him — along with representatives from several other Gulf of Alaska communities, like Kodiak, Old Harbor, Port Lions, Ouzinkie, Karluk, Seward, Cordova and others, to a climate adaptation workshop in Kodiak last weekend. Over the course of roughly three days, more than 50 attendees from the Kodiak and Chugach Regions, including government officials from the Alaska Department of Fish & Game and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Tribes and other organizations talked out potential solutions to challenges brought on by climate change.
“You bring those people together who haven’t traditionally worked well in the past to kind of work in a new way together, rooted in trust and relationship building," said Isabella Haywood, with the Juneau-based nonprofit Spruce Root.
She helped facilitate the Adapt Alaska Coasts: South Coast Workshop. It’s based on a model that’s already being used in Southeast Alaska. Another facilitator was Hannah-Marie Garcia-Ladd, the program director of the Indigenous Sentinels Network under the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island Tribal Government which oversees the Skipper Science program.
The Kodiak workshop, which was the first in a planned series of four around the state, featured a variety of projects: creating a concept for a new clam garden in Ouzinkie, curbing overgrowth of alders around Old Harbor’s airstrip and restoring salmon habitat in Marka Bay, near Afognak.
Another project is in Karluk on the western side of Kodiak Island. Like Akhiok, Karluk has been contending with erosion, which is threatening the road to the community’s fuel supply. Alaska’s oldest existing Russian Orthodox church is in Karluk. That had to be moved back 80 feet from an eroding cliff a few years ago, and it likely will need to be moved again in a few years. The Karluk River is also home to strong local salmon runs, which are vital for both subsistence and commercial fishermen.
Andie Wall, the environmental coordinator with the Kodiak Area Native Association, helped with this work and assisted Leilani Murillo from the Akhiok Tribal Council during the workshop. She said that protecting Karluk from future coastal erosion will likely require collaboration between a number of entities — the kind of complicated problem the workshop was meant to help with.
“If we have to move the mouth of the river to protect the community of Karluk, because that spit has moved, there’s going to be a lot of other people that we have to engage, like ADF&G, (the Kodiak Regional Aquaculture Association), Koniag, Inc," Wall said. "Because all of those folks are doing hydrology work on that river but not a lot of those conversations or data, communication, is being shared.”
A lack of sharing knowledge between organizations and groups is another challenge the workshop was hoping to address. Haywood, with Spruce Root, said the goal is to replicate creative solutions to help other small, rural communities around the state that lack the people or resources to combat climate change.
“Some of the big challenges that we see are funding, are of a lack of capacity, and honestly, sometimes just information overload," Haywood said. "There are so many resources in the climate adaptation space, but it can take a lot of work and a lot of energy and a lot of staff time to figure out what makes the most sense for a specific project at a specific time.”
For example, in Akhiok, the tribal government is trying to determine which matching grants to apply for to help address the failed revetment. But in Karluk, which is half the size of Akhiok, one of the main challenges is capacity.
That didn’t stop Leilani Murillo, a recent high school graduate who is the Karluk Environmental Coordinator with KANA and was assisting with this erosion mitigation project at the workshop. She said she’s preparing to apply for Indian Environmental General Assistance Program grant funding with the Environmental Protection Agency to protect the community from further erosion.