I would like to introduce Dr. Bull Bennett, who
was born in Brunswick, Maine, and grew up
in the mountains and prairies of Wyoming.
He earned his doctorate in Atmosphere, Environment,
and Water Resources and in 2008 was appointed by the United
States Secretary of the Interior as a charter
member of the National Geospatial Advisory Committee.
In 2011 he was appointed by the United States Secretary
of Commerce to the National Climate Assessment Development
and Advisory Committee.
And his responsibilities to that group
were to coordinate and lead the development of the Indigenous
Land and Resources Chapter of the Third National Climate
Assessment, which was released in May of 2014.
Our primary speakers, Dr. Bennett, Robert Gough,
and Dr. Julie Koppel Maldonado, were all lead
and contributing authors to that chapter of the National Climate
Assessment, the tribal chapter.
Our second speaker, Robert Gough,
is an attorney with graduate degrees in sociology
and cultural anthropology who specializes
in cultural ecology.
He's worked with American Indian tribes
on cultural and natural resource issues over the last 40 years,
particularly in the Great Lakes and Great Plains regions.
He co-directed the Native Wind Powering America,
supporting Intertribal Council on Utility Policy
to build sustainable reservation economies based
on renewable energy.
Now, this received the inaugural World Clean Energy Award
in 2007 and was announced at the Clinton Global
Initiative in 2013.
Our other featured speaker for this evening, Dr. Julie Koppel
Maldonado, obtained her doctorate in anthropology
from American University in Washington, DC.
Her research focused on the experiences
of environmental change and displacement
in tribal communities in coastal Louisiana.
She's consulted for the United Nations Development Program
and World Bank on post-disaster needs assessment.
And she's also the lead author and organizer
for a special issue of Climate Change
and her book, Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples
in the United States--
Impact, Experiences, and Actions.
To open this evening, we'll be turning
to Scott Frazier, the director of Project Indigenous
and his collaborator, Mr. Albert "Abby" Ybarra.
And with that I gratefully turn the mic over to Scott and Abby.
Thank you all so much for your patience
during those first silent minutes.
Scott and Abby, your mics are now hot and open.
Thank you, [INAUDIBLE].
We just want to say that we're really proud of our speakers
tonight.
We honor them.
And we want to open this discussion tonight
with an honor song not only for them,
but for you came and joined with us.
But we know that climate change is a very important issue
in Indian country as well as around the world.
We want to sing a song for the elders.
And this is in honor of our speakers tonight
and for the listeners at home.
Abby?
Thank you, Scott.
And thank you all for being here.
This is called-- the song, as Scott said,
we're calling to the elders to be with us this evening
as we discuss the issues that affect us here on the earth
and to ask us to pray with those who came before us.
And we're all part of them, and we're extension of them
in mind, heart, and spirit.
[DRUMMING]
[DRUM BEATING AND VOCALIZING]
80
Thank you, Bruce.
Thank you, Scott.
Thank you, Abby, we'll now be turning over the presentation
on the mic to Dr. Bull Bennett.
First of all, I'd like to extend my sincerest gratitude
to Bruce, to Abby, and Scott for the introduction and also
the honor song.
And I also want to get started by also recognizing
and thanking my colleagues, both Julie Maldonado and Bob Gough,
for their tireless effort in helping
see this presentation, ultimately
this chapter, come to fruition.
Had it not been for their tireless efforts,
we would not have the chapter that we
have and are so, so proud of.
So with that, I will go ahead and get started here.
So to begin, just kind of give you
a sense of what this discussion is going to be about,
I'm going to take on the first part of this discussion
and then hand it over to Bob, who will then hand
the discussion over to Julie.
What I'm going to do is talk about, at altitude,
I'll talk about the climate assessment, what it meant.
I will get into the process of what the assessment was.
And ultimately, I will whittle down
to where our effort picked up in terms
of developing this chapter specific to Indian country.
And once we get into that part of the findings,
I will talk about some of those findings superficially.
But then Bob and Julie will both come on after me
and go into further depth of what some of these findings
mean specific to Indigenous communities.
So with that, I'll go ahead and get started.
120
assessment is that this assessment
is the largest and most comprehensive evaluation
of climate change impacts in the United States.
And I would also argue it rivals the IPCC in terms of content
as well as in terms of rigor and transparency.
The second message is that Americans across the country
are feeling the effects.
This isn't something that's on the horizon.
Rather, we are already beginning to feel these effects.
And some communities, that ball is well down the road.
Extreme weather, sea level rise, heavy downpours,
heat waves-- all of the above and then some--
are already being affected and felt in Indian country,
as well as across the United States.
There's evidence in all regions and sectors
that climate change is happening now.
And once again, this isn't something
that's on the horizon.
Rather, it is happening at this moment.
In a word of caution, it's really easy for folks
to go from awareness to despair in less than five seconds.
The important message here is that there
are tremendous opportunities for all of us
to manage what is causing climate change
and prepare for its effects.
And so there's no reason to become hopeless
early on in the game.
We have much work to do.
So the goals of the third National Climate Assessment--
again, this was mandated by Congress, the Global Change
Act--
is to enhance the ability of the United States
to anticipate, mitigate, and adapt to changes
in the global environment.
And the Assessment's vision was to advance
an inclusive, broad-based, and sustained process
for assessing communication, all the knowledge that we've
been able to compile, so that we can make informed
decisions moving forward.
So the outline for the report, we
started off with climate change and the American people.
We did an overview of what the report findings were.
We talked about our changing climate,
which delves into the science of the assessment.
And there were seven sectors in six
sectoral cross-cut chapters.
The tribal chapter falls among those six sectoral cross-cuts,
and I'll get to that here in just a moment.
There were eight regions and two biogeographical cross-cuts.
We had a chapter and a session dedicated to responses,
where gaps in the knowledge were,
where the research needed to be focused.
And also, focusing on something relatively new
is the sustained assessment process,
which is different than the previous two assessments.
So cross-cutting chapters, the sectoral cross-cuts--
and the reason why these are new and were included
was that it was recognized that many of the impacts
couldn't just be categorized across one sector
or across one theme.
Specifically, the Indigenous chapter,
which is highlighted here in red,
really dealt with every one of the regions,
every one of the sectors, and everything in between.
And so it just made good sense to have
this cross-cutting chapter and look at that transection.
is the Indigenous Peoples, Lands, Resources chapter.
And so what I'll do is I will guide us
through some of the findings at altitude
here before we get on to Bob and Julie.
and I'll spend a couple of minutes on these next two
slides here.
I was asked as a member of the Climate Assessment Development
and Advisory Committee--
I was joined by a colleague and dear friend of mine,
Nancy Maynard, from NASA--
to basically pull the team together.
And our authors, which certainly goes
without saying that we would not have this chapter as we have it
had it not been for the efforts of Patricia Cochran,
from the Alaska Native Science Commission;
Bob Gough, who's joining us on this talk,
from the Intertribal Council and Utility Policy;
Kathy Lynn, from the University of Oregon;
Julie Maldonado, Garrit Voggesser,
from the National Wildlife Federation;
and Sue Wotkyns, from Northern Arizona University;
and certainly last but not least, Karen
Cozzetto, from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
So about the process, I want to take a couple of minutes
to describe what happened here.
So I was under the assumption that there
would be quite a Native representation on the committee
to help guide this new frontier, this new effort
within the assessment process.
And as it turned out, I was the only one.
And upon my acceptance to this responsibility,
I was also quickly informed that it
was my job to capture the voice of 566 federally
recognized tribes.
For those in Indian country and those
who know me realize that I barely
speak for my own family, let alone my own people,
let alone the 566 federally recognized tribes,
let alone those state or unrecognized or self-recognized
tribes.
And so it's inappropriate and it's impossible for me
to speak alone and capture the voice of all these people.
And so I did what any normal person would do,
is I reached out and pleaded for help with people
that I knew and trusted, and people
that I knew that were heavy lifters in Indian country.
And many rose to the task.
And that began our technical input process.
That went from roughly about August of 2011
through March 1 of 2012.
We scavenged the four directions talking
with anybody who would listen, anybody
who wanted to contribute, and from Oklahoma,
from the Pacific Islands, from Alaska,
and pretty much every state within the lower 48 states.
It was a huge lift, a huge effort.
By the time our March 1 deadline rolled around,
when it was time to shut down the technical input
phase of this process, we had well over 200 technical inputs
just for the tribal chapter alone.
I wanted to caveat this by--
the committee indicated that they weren't expecting
more than maybe 10 to 20 technical inputs
for the entire chapter.
And Indian country responded accordingly.
And well over 200 technical inputs
were offered to the assessment.
And we barely skimmed the surface
of what was contributed.
So it was a tremendous lift by Indian country.
So the author team which you saw from the previous slide--
our first zero-order draft--
thanks to Julie, who put that thing together--
was well over 50 pages.
Our task between March 1 of 2012 and June 1 of 2012
was take that 50 pages of content
and take a chainsaw to it and whittle it down to 3,000 words.
So in that process, we ended up having
to omit a lot of very rich and robust content out
of the chapter.
However, that information is not lost.
And when we get to the sustained assessment section,
Julie will tell you where a lot of that information
and those data went.
So June 1, we submitted our chapter.
And then our responsibility was to sit
back, let the United States citizens respond,
and all of those that were weighing in
on reviews to tighten this up and to present this chapter.
And I have to say that this was probably the most transparent,
aggressively attacked process that I have ever
been involved with.
So I wanted to go over a couple of assumptions-- actually,
dispel a couple of myths.
One of the things that the assessment called out
and that many on this call are already aware of
is that Indian country just is not reservations.
Indigenous people are all over these United States,
and also including Alaska the Pacific Islands,
the Caribbean islands, all of which
is considered Indian country and all
have extended families that extend well
off the reservation lands.
The other assumption is that many of the Indigenous
communities are either static, unresponsive, or just purely
victims to what is happening in their changing environment.
And this simply is false.
There are many Indigenous efforts
all across Indian country who are taking the initial steps,
which may be increasing awareness and education,
all the way up through full deployment of adaptation
and mitigation processes.
And so Indian country is not static.
So with that, I want to get into some of the findings
that we found in our chapter.
and food--
we observed and future impacts from climate change
threaten Native Peoples' access to traditional foods,
such as fish, game, and wild and cultivated crops,
which have provided sustenance as well as cultural,
economic, medicinal, and community health
for generations.
When we are attacked and investigated these findings
and whittled those down, we took a risk-based framing approach
to this.
And so all who contributed to this were in high confidence
that these findings were indeed transparent.
Again, we used a risk-based framework
to determine these findings.
a couple of examples that are happening
is we're starting to see catastrophic fuel loading
and fires are occurring up in Alaska.
We're also seeing infestations from bark beetle
and other pests that are contributing to changes
in ecosystem integrity, starting to see an increase in intensity
and frequency of wildfires, coupled
with drought, coupled with land-clearing activities,
and so on.
And so what we're seeing is these forest systems where
a lot of Indigenous people are deriving their food
resources from are being changed quite dramatically and quite
quickly.
Our second key finding and our key message dealt with water.
Water quality and quantity--
we witnessed a significant decrease in water quality
and quantity due to a variety of factors that
also include climate change.
It's not just a climate change phenomena.
Rather, it also is a human phenomenon.
But climate change-- it is exacerbating its effects.
And we're seeing those effects on drinking water,
on food, and on cultures.
Native communities' vulnerabilities--
and have limited capacity to adapt
to water-related challenges.
And these are exacerbated by historic and contemporary
government policies and poor socioeconomic conditions, which
make it challenging for Indian country to respond.
Again, our confidence in this finding
was very high based on the technical inputs
that were delivered to the assessment process.
So a further example, if we take a look at this graph,
on the left is the assumption that--
in a world without a changing climate.
And you see on the graphic on the left
that there's still quite a bit of demand for water.
When coupled with the A2 scenario, which
represents business as usual, which
happens to be the trajectory we are on right now,
we're starting to see that demand for water
will increase exponentially as time persists
through the 21st century.
And our observation was that declining sea ice in Alaska
is causing significant impacts to Native communities,
including increasingly risky travel
and hunting conditions, damage and loss to settlements, food
insecurity, and socioeconomic and health impacts
from loss of cultures, traditional knowledge,
and homelands.
Again, based on the technical inputs
that were provided to us, our confidence in this finding
is very high.
380
one of the things to keep in mind
is that things tend to congregate in the Arctic.
And so when you are a sustenance community like many Alaska
Natives are, having that bioaccumulation plus changes
in the physical nature of the Arctic
is really disrupting that cultural identity.
And it's wreaking havoc, and it's creating changes
in ways that historically are unprecedented,
have never been seen before.
And it's really jeopardizing a very fragile but yet important
ecosystem.
As we see the comparisons from 1980 through 2012,
we've seen a reduction in a substantial amount
of summer sea ice.
And it's projected that, in the not-too-distant future,
we will experience our first ice-free summer
in the Arctic, which has opened up the Northwest Passage, which
is already being utilized.
And we're starting to begin to see development in the Arctic
that historically had never, ever taken place.
Our fourth message deals with permafrost thaw.
Alaska Native communities are increasingly
exposed to health and livelihood hazards from increasing
temperatures that thawing permafrost,
which are damaging critical infrastructure,
adding to other stressors on traditional lifestyles.
Again, based on the technical inputs
that were provided to the author team,
our confidence in this finding was very high.
411
with the lower emissions scenario, which is something
that we're striving towards, the point being is
there will continue to be permafrost
thawing in the Arctic.
Under the business as usual scenario,
by the end of the century, we're looking at a dramatic increase
in thawing of that permafrost.
And that could lead to some rather interesting impacts
in the Arctic.
Under the lower emission scenario, the bottom graph,
we are committed to thawing permafrost.
Although, if we can somehow manage to lower our emissions,
the changes, the thawing, will not--
are projected to not nearly be as dramatic
as they are under the business as usual model.
And thawing permafrost costs money.
And if you look down to the 2006 to 2080--
$56 billion, an additional $5.6 to $7.6 billion
are attributed directly to climate change impacts,
both naturally occurring as well as anthropogenic.
So this is costing billions of dollars
and will continue to tax the economy because of its impacts.
Our fifth key message deals with relocation.
Climate change-related impacts are
forcing relocation of tribal and Indigenous communities,
especially in coastal locations.
Relocation is not a 19th century phenomenon.
It is very much a 21st century phenomenon.
And increasingly, more and more Indigenous communities
are facing with the reality of either digging
in or having to relocate.
And as we get further into our discussion,
Dr. Maldonado will go into further detail on relocation.
Again, based on the technical inputs
that were provided to us, our confidence in this finding
was very high.
449
are being damaged profoundly and eroding out to sea.
And a lot of these communities have no place else to go.
And this isn't just true for the Arctic,
but it's also true in coastal areas around the United States
and the islands, as well.
So at this point, I'm going to conclude
my part of this discussion.
And I want to hand the presentation over
to Bob Gough, who is one of the lead authors on the assessment.
So without further ado, Bob.
We can't hear you.
on the [INAUDIBLE] control panel?
We're going to [INAUDIBLE] So Julie, your mic is hot,
and you have control of the screen.
to those listening for the frog in my throat.
I hope you bear with me.
And hopefully, Bob can join us soon, as well.
We will skip ahead for a bit to the last message
that Bull mentioned on relocation.
And thank you so much, Bull, for having us
on this and the lead-up to this key message.
And just to take folks a little more in depth
to this key message and why we settled
on it and it's importance right now to communities
around the country, not just in Alaska,
but many coastal locations, especially--
493
was that climate change-related impacts
are forcing relocation of tribal and Indigenous communities.
In particular, entire Indigenous and other communities
living in coastal low-lying areas that already
face a multitude of stressors, such as extractive practices
and unsustainable development on or near Native lands
are being forcibly displaced or choosing relocation
as a strategy to combat increasingly
tenuous conditions.
These relocations and the lack of governance mechanisms
or funding to support them are causing
loss of community and culture, health impacts,
and economic decline, further exacerbating
tribal impoverishment that is already in existence.
Some of the tribes most urgently experiencing
forced displacement and relocation, such as Newtok
and Kivalina in Alaska and Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana,
engaged with the NCA at workshops
and provided technical inputs about what
their communities are experiencing
and actions they're taking.
They've gathered together to form partnerships and knowledge
exchanges, working with each other's company
at various forums, such as the Indigenous Peoples Climate
Change Working Group, as well as Rising Voices.
And to get into a little more, also,
of the actions that these communities
are taking, as Bull started, this
is not just a stagnant process.
This is very much communities in transition and taking
very proactive responses to what is happening.
A recent result of a lot of their engagement
was a recommendation to the White House
by the president's State, Local, and Tribal Leaders Climate
Preparedness and Resilience Task Force to, quote,
"explore the federal role in addressing
climate change-related displacement, needs
of affected communities, and institutional barriers
to community relocation."
And to delve into this little further,
I want to take you to coastal Louisiana
to provide an example of lowland communities
that have been at the forefront of forced displacement
relocation issues.
Our leaders from the Isle de Jean Charles tribe
in Louisiana, whose culture and water-based settlement
and livelihoods are threatened by rapid environmental change
due to oil and gas extraction-related development,
river mismanagement, oil disasters-- not just BP,
but hundreds and thousands of disasters there--
subsidence, as well as increased exposure to hurricanes
and the highest rate of relative sea level rise worldwide.
Coastal Louisiana is losing land at a faster rate
than anywhere in the world.
To put that into perspective a bit,
especially for those in the Greater Washington, DC, area,
the rate of land loss currently being experienced
is equivalent to all of Washington, DC,
disappearing underwater in less than two years.
So by about the end of 2016, all of DC
would be underwater at this rate.
By the time the US Geological Survey
creates a new map of the area, it's already outdated
because of the rate of loss due to relative sea level
rise, which is a combination, of course,
of climate-induced sea level rise,
as well as the subsidence and sinking
land from the redirection of the Mississippi River,
and dredged passageways for pipelines and rigs,
and oil and gas being sucked out from there.
In addition, the Isle and surrounding communities
have suffered impacts from eight major storms just since 2002.
The Isle de Jean Charles, which was until the 1960s
approximately 5 miles by 12 miles,
has now eroded to approximately one quarter mile by 2 miles.
In 2002, there were 78 houses and approximately 325 people
living on the island.
Today, there are about 25 houses and 70 people left.
With each hurricane, more and more people
have been forced to relocate.
The Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority
concluded that if restoration and flood protection
actions are not taken, the Isle will be gone before 2050.
Yet the tribe has been mostly left out
of government land restoration and flood protection plans,
with no options left for institute adaptation, which
is always the first and primary response the communities are
taking, doing what they can to stay in place,
stay on their ground.
However, recognizing when those options are no longer
in existence and that need to be proactive to maintain
their cultural sovereignty and bring
their scattering community together,
the Isle de Jean Charles Tribal Council
began work on relocation in 2002,
so about a generation ago, almost 15 years.
They have formed partnerships with entities and organizations
from the local to international level, built
a team of collaborators with practitioners, academics,
activists, and other communities from around the country
to move forward.
The Isle de Jean Charles Tribal Council established
a community-based, proactive relocation plan titled
"Indigenous Routes for Sustainable Futures--
Proactive Solutions for a Time of Change."
This plan is focused on being zero-impact, renewable
energy-driven, seventh-generation community
that also includes maintaining and restoring
the island before and during relocation
to build capacity and adaptation and maintain
that place for people to return to to practice
their cultural practices and subsistence practices.
The Isle de Jean Charles is providing agencies
an opportunity to be an exemplary model for learning,
development, and coordinating support for relocation
and working to implement proactive adaptation, actions
that will help other regions while securing
a proactive solution for the tribe itself.
Yet without internal and little external funding
or institutional mechanisms for community relocation support,
the Tribal Council has not yet been
able to implement the relocation plan.
Recent efforts include last month's Northeast speaking
tour, featuring the documentary about the Isle,
Can't Stop the Water and discussion about the Tribal
Council's relocation plan in cities across the Eastern
seaboard.
This included a briefing to Congress,
which I encourage you to view the link
at the top of the slide.
And we can provide that to you, as well,
and we can provide to Bruce.
So really, this is just one example of some of the actions
communities are taking while needed policies are created.
As the NCA's Indigenous Peoples Chapter recognized in relation
to key message number 5, "New governance institutions,
frameworks, and funding mechanisms
are needed to specifically respond
to the increasing necessity for climate
change-induced relocation.
To be effective and culturally appropriate,
it is important that such institutional frameworks
recognize the sovereignty of tribal governments
and that any institutional development
stems from significant engagement
with tribal representatives."
And to transition us a bit from the key messages
into this continued process, as Bull mentioned earlier,
this is not a stagnant report.
Either while the Third Climate Assessment
was released a year ago this month,
the process itself is a live, evolving process.
And the NCA and affiliated agencies
are working towards the creation of a sustained assessment which
will assess climate change and its impacts on the US
and communicate that information to stakeholders and policy
decision makers on an ongoing basis.
And so while we have these five key messages in play,
it's looking at what's come of those key messages,
as well as, Bull mentioned, there
is so much wealth and rich information
that we weren't able to include.
But not all of that is lost.
That also moves that into informing
the sustained assessment process.
So to just explain a little bit about the sustained assessment,
the goals of the assessment include--
to build capacity to conduct more
sophisticated, useful and credible assessments over time,
to develop consistent methodologies for use
by regional and sectoral teams, provide information
in a more timely way to support decisions,
enable full review of issues of national importance,
deepen the understanding of climate change effects,
and investigate new scientific issues of concern.
The federal government and the third NCA's Development
Advisory Committee both acknowledge the impact
that climate change will have on Indigenous communities
and have made recommendations to address the issues.
included, in the NCA's 2013 Sustained Assessment
Report, which stated, the NCA should ensure adequate support
for tribal engagement and future assessments
and include tribal engagement as a metric of success
for ongoing efforts.
The participation is critical to the success
of a sustained assessment by providing science support
and data collection, including Indigenous
knowledge on tribal lands.
However, the ability of tribes to participate in
ongoing emerging assessment-related activities
is seriously hampered by a lack of resources.
Therefore, the report also concluded
that the USGCRP agencies, as appropriate,
should make funding available to tribal
environmental organizations for production of technical inputs
and coordination of these inputs as part of a sustained
assessment.
Further, specific metrics related
to engagement by tribes and future assessment activities
should be developed and employed.
And related to this, several NCA authors and contributors
recently wrote a paper that will soon
go out with the Climatic Change journal that
includes several recommendations to enhance
the inclusion of Indigenous peoples in the sustained NCA.
Some of these recommendations include
instituting a dedicated Indigenous Peoples, Land,
and Resources chapter in future NCAs,
providing financial resources for Indigenous representatives
to effectively participate, and providing network support
for Indigenous groups, producing an NCA special report
on Indigenous Peoples, Land and Resources,
building capacity for adaptation,
and honor and recognize the value
of traditional knowledges.
And to understand why it is important for continued
engagement in the sustained assessment process,
while the NCA is a scientific document,
it does not make policy recommendations.
It is one of the key documents that policymakers turn to
for climate change-related issues.
Already experiencing the impacts of a changing climate
and actively creating solutions, Indigenous leaders
and communities should have their voices
heard in this process.
Thank you, and my sincere apologies for the bit
of sickness and coughing.
So thank you for bearing with me.
And I will turn it over to Bob now, if he's able to get on.
Thanks, Bob.
We can hear you, and you now have the the cone.
And Julie, gosh, I hope you feel better, [LAUGHS]
but cut your mic for right now.
All right, thank you.
The National Climate Assessment process
is risk-based, as we heard.
And I'm going to take us through a couple of the slides.
Some of them we've seen, but we're
going to get in the weeds a little bit
on a couple of these, because what we are seeing
is that the impacts of climate change
that have been scheduled, if you will,
forecasted for the future, we're seeing them
happening already and sooner.
And this is exactly the kind of thing
that we've been expecting to see.
And we are now having to face up to the fact
that this is what's happening in our world.
Bob, we can't see your screen.
Little Play button, top of your control panel.
The button-- is now on air showing screen, it says.
Now we can see it.
OK.
Well, the sectors that Bull talked about,
water is certainly at the top.
But as we look at the energy and supply use, transportation,
agriculture, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human health,
none of them occur absent water.
Energy is one of our major uses for water.
Transportation on rivers and oceans, lakes, and agriculture,
as we've seen, is an extreme user of water,
as is forestry, and ecosystems and biodiversity.
So when we talk about water resources,
it's not an isolated, but it's cross-cutting across so many.
And as you can see a little drought wounds.
Some of the evergreens that we're seeing here, the spruce--
these looked like they were taken out
by the spruce beetle and the bark beetle.
And once the trees are weakened, they
need water resources to be able to fight off
the boring of the beetles.
And if they can't get it, then they dry out.
And then it's prime set for fire.
No, Bob.
Bob, you actually need to go into [INAUDIBLE]..
All right, I've got it.
OK, good.
I've got it.
Regions and biographical cross-cuts-- again,
we're looking at not just oceans and marine resources.
Native Peoples Native Homelands Climate Workshop,
15, 16 years ago, started looking at tribes
and then expanded to Alaska and Native Hawaiians.
And this round, we moved to the other Indigenous peoples
of North America in Samoa and in some of the other flag islands.
So we are seeing that the input and the reach for Indigenous
peoples is growing.
And the input that's coming in is
bringing in Indigenous knowledge from the four
corners of the planet.
Again, the cross-cutting chapters-- you can see it.
Our lands and resources for Indigenous peoples
are nothing without water, water rights.
And we're going to see a whole lot of issues developing
over community and tribal and Indigenous water rights
in the coming years as these cross-cutting chapters
start becoming more and more critical.
Looking at extreme weather, again, climate events
have increased in recent decades.
New and stronger evidence confirms
that many of these increases are related to human activity.
But they are all related to water, very often.
The heavy precipitation, the ice storms that take poles down
across the Great Plains, that leave our streets
with black ice, we're seeing these happening
in places where it would be rare to see
black ice on a public highway.
But we're seeing that reaching further and further north.
So again, keep this in mind, that we're
looking at future climates, and we're looking at them today.
We're seeing what's happening in many of our neighborhoods
and many of our communities happening earlier, sooner,
and with greater intensity than we
may have imagined in the past.
As we look at higher emissions and the temperature change,
we know that warm air can hold more water,
can hold more water vapor, can hold more carbon dioxide.
These higher temperatures and warmer ambient air
are giving us all of the earmarks of delivering
the future climate that we've been talking about and having
that show up and causing us widespread impacts.
The impacts related to climate change
are evident in many sectors.
They are expected to become increasingly disruptive
across the nation.
And as you can see, whether it's lack of water and drought,
or lack of water and fires, or too much water--
hurricanes or flooding-- we are seeing
that we are going to have to be dealing
with every possible variant coming down the pike.
The report findings talk about infrastructure.
And it's critical, I think, for Indigenous peoples
to remember that much of the infrastructure that we are
living with, working with, and living around today
is often not of our own making.
It's not coming from our cultures.
It's coming from modernity.
And we've had to learn to adapt to these infrastructure
changes.
And then, also, see how climate is taking its toll
on these foreign pieces of infrastructure
and institutions, if you will.
When we look at extreme heat--
we're seeing this in the Great Plains--
we have a temperature range from 30
below in the winter that can get to 120 in the summertime.
And we're likely not to see it go to 150 too often very soon.
But what we are seeing is that, rather
than having four or five extremely hot,
triple-digit days, we're getting weeks,
three weeks of triple digits.
And that is the kind of trade off
that we're going to have to be making adjustments to
with regard to infrastructure, our roads, our houses.
We're going to have to find ways to make our houses
not only warm in the winter, when power failures from ice
storms and the like may be plaguing us, but also
how to keep them cooler in the summer
and doing that with the methods and strategies
separate from just more energy inputs, which
is the kind of thinking that has gotten us into the problem,
if you will.
are jeopardized by climate change in a number of ways.
And they affect the ecosystem and the livelihoods of farmers,
ranchers, anyone who utilizes the environment.
And those ecosystems would be the subject of a subsistence
culture, as well-- hunting, fishing, gathering,
and the like.
We are seeing greater magnitude of floods happening
and greater, again, as I said, greater 100-degree days.
If you see on that map, South Dakota--
right there just a little above Nebraska,
just a little above the center of the country--
we are now getting summertime that looks like central Texas.
And we are not built--
our infrastructure is not designed
to handle those kinds of conditions.
here with the Indigenous peoples and climate change.
It's posing particular threats to Indigenous peoples'
health, well-being, homes, and ways of life.
As you can see, there's some folks wild ricing, probably
in the Great Lakes.
We're seeing someone there with a little pipeline having
to deal with that probably in Alaska.
I think it's the damage to infrastructure and melting
permafrost.
Heat going through those pipes can go right into the ground,
begin melting permafrost, which again, is another form of water
and methane.
And it's an ice-forming situation that melts
and releases methane, which is a very volatile greenhouse gas,
far more powerful than carbon dioxide to the 20--
maybe 20 times.
But as we look at the findings here,
I wanted to show you that chronic stresses
come to food supplies that have always
served to get people through times of hunger,
times of food shortages.
Wild rice in particular-- which I've done a good amount
of graduate work on some years back--
it can grow where corn usually doesn't grow.
So it was the staple--
a grain, if you will.
It's an aquatic grass that could be grown and stored.
It provided you with stored protein
that you could use to store for two, three, four, five,
six years even.
So it replaced and served the purpose
of corn, in many respects, around the Great Lakes.
And I wanted to just show you that the habitat for wild rice
in that little map is a couple of loaves
in northern Wisconsin, a big chunk there in Minnesota,
and there are pockets of it in Michigan and Thunder Bay,
and Ontario, and the like.
So it's there.
But we're seeing climate bringing stresses
to both people and our resources.
And in so doing, the water quality and quantity,
supply and reliability, are jeopardized by climate.
They change in a variety of ways that
affect ecosystem livelihoods we are seeing this--
I don't know if that went backwards,
my slide went backwards.
Yeah, OK.
Sorry.
Wild rice in the Great Lakes--
there are legal implications to where wild rice was found.
It was incorporated into treaties.
And you can see the treaty, treaty sections, the treaty
territories, ceded territories.
And those are the places where, if you
look on the map in the corner, that's
where the Ojibwe and Anishinaabe reservations can
be found today, still utilizing that treaty land
and utilizing the wild rice resources, which they worked
hard to secure by treaty right, for their hunting
and gathering.
So there are places where it's protected and has
been protected for the last 150 years.
But how long that's going to be possible,
as we start seeing the climate of Nebraska creeping up
to reach northern Wisconsin--
we don't know if wild rice is going
to be able to suffer that change very well.
And this is a slide to show you why.
It's a wild plant.
And if you look at the bottom, it's
got a very small root system.
One seed will produce that cluster of root hairs.
And that is what holds that wild rice plant
in place through the year, through the summer.
It sends up a ribbon.
The ribbon reaches the surface and starts to float.
That means it needs relatively shallow water
for the early part of the spring.
And if the big rains come in the early spring,
you can flood out the crop, and it may die.
And may not get a crop that year from those seeds.
I put the photo next to it there so you
can see that plant grows taller than people,
taller than the man and woman in the picture.
And that whole plant is anchored in the mud with that small root
system.
So as water levels go down, it becomes harder and harder
for that plant to sustain itself going through the growing
season when it's got to mature and actually produce wild rice
to be harvested in the end of August and September
and, depending on the year, in and around those kind of dates.
So the last piece I wanted to show you on that same diagram
is that wild rice is a wild plant.
It's not wheat it doesn't grow and hold all of its seed
onto its head where you can move a combine in and take
all of the seed in one harvest.
If you look at the color picture,
you can see that there are flowers at the upper left hand
side that have already bloomed, blossomed,
have been pollinated.
And they are now filling in with the rice seed
to ultimately give you your wild rice.
And as you go further down the rice stalk,
you start seeing that those seeds at the bottom
haven't even flowered yet.
And this is the way--
the survival strategy for the wild rice,
in that it will produce, over the course of maybe two
and a half, three weeks, the same plant.
And that same plant can be harvested four or five,
maybe six times if you do it gently enough.
If you move through the rice bed, and you're
careful of the plants.
And you move through the bed and look to actually
get yourself a harvest of just a few seeds,
you can come back in a few more days
and get a few more from the same plant.
So it's a great adaptation strategy.
But it can be subject to lots of problems
if we start seeing greater variability
in water levels or very disruptive harvesting
practices.
which is where water and our food, subsistence food
resources, come together very often.
And as we can see, sometimes they
get overwhelmed from the impacts coming from weather that we've
not seen for any amount of time in the variety of ecosystems
around the country.
So I'll show you this little bit about wild rice
in northern Wisconsin.
But you can find ecosystem work with any of the communities
that you're looking for.
Oceans-- that's water, too.
And we're seeing-- you're seeing oceans' change, their chemistry
changing, becoming more and more acid.
And we're seeing that that takes its toll
on the variety of life forms that our marine ecosystems,
marine life depend.
So we are seeing threats happening in every direction.
We're seeing it happening in every waterway.
And we need to be looking at these very carefully
and looking at strategies, perhaps Indigenous strategies,
that have worked in the past for treating smaller
areas, some certain areas, certain food
resources, and the like.
On this map, you can see the coasts,
whether you are in the Gulf Coast with Houston and New
Orleans, or the Great Lakes coast, the East or West,
or any of the islands in the Pacific.
I've been doing some training with disaster management
and disaster preparedness and went to Honolulu
for the FEMA training.
And everyone there had island in the last name
of where they came from.
And they weren't necessarily buying Turtle Island from me,
but I did point out that, while not
from an island in the Pacific, I'm
coming there from South Dakota.
We are experiencing much the same kinds of things
even in South Dakota, where we've got shoreline, more shore
than the state of Florida.
And we have seen our water resources go down
to the seven to eight year drought.
We've had to move our water intake plants and pipes.
And then we've had the tsunami of a 500-year flood come
with the Missouri River flooding.
It was perhaps three years ago.
And we are seeing these kinds of impacts all over the country,
not just in faraway island communities,
or in Alaska, or even in the bayous of Louisiana.
We're seeing it happening all over the place.
So sea level rise is certainly something we're dealing with.
But we're also dealing with subsidence,
as Julie was talking about, with regard
to the communities in the bayou in Louisiana,
where land is sinking because of our heavy extraction
of fossil fuels.
And we're seeing the lack of replenishment
of deltas from sediment by the channeling
of our rivers and the like.
So a lot of our adaptations over the last 50 to 100 years
are now showing up to be issues and problems and things
that we're going to have to look at really long and hard.
The model scenarios that we've put out
in National Climate Assessment 3 talks about some
of the precipitation changes.
There's a great deal of science in there
for any of the Native folks listening here
to put your heads through and see what the opportunities are.
Look at these models.
Look at what's rolling out.
The time is now to be being very vigilant in this regard.
The observed precipitation changes
are more consistent with the drying
in the Southwest, northern Rockies,
and Southeast, and wetness elsewhere.
The observed precipitation change
showed much more variability.
Even in the Northern plains, where
we've had years and years of drought,
we see even in across the Dakotas and into Montana
that we've got a great deal of water and variability
for the resources that we have there.
Again, the last is that we're looking at ice-free Arctic
in this century.
We are looking at that coming up.
It's the self-fulfilling prophecy of
and those who were looking for the Northwest Passage.
We've created it.
And we're now going to have to deal with it.
So this is how climate change and dealing with loss
of sea ice and polar sheets--
again, this is the shift in water.
You add temperature to the air, it can hold more moisture,
and we started seeing greater trends in evaporation
and see more ice loss from the ice sheets.
And we've got it documented.
So we will document very well this ride that we're on.
I put the messages in here in order
to be able to keep in mind that the food, fires, and forests
are particularly important to Native peoples,
maybe much more so than mainstream communities,
because of traditional ways and other uses of those resources
for cultural, economic, medicinal, and community
health.
But the message of water quality and quantity,
again, needs to be underscored.
Our vulnerabilities and limited capacity
to adapt to water-related challenges
are only made worse by the historical and contemporary
government policies and the lack of healthy socioeconomic
conditions that could have provide us with buffers.
But we just don't have that buffer.
Declining sea ice in Alaska, significant impacts
in Native communities, food insecurity--
we're seeing this at every turn.
I think these are the last slides.
I wanted to show that the climate change
in regard to water and pulling water out of our system--
we are looking now at running pipelines
across from the aquifers that we've depended upon,
that served us during the earlier droughts
in the last century.
And we turned to groundwater, and we seem to do OK.
Well, now we're running that through our system,
and we already started to see problems
with how we're going to be able to deal
with changes in groundwater and surface water
in the coming days.
The Arctic marine food web is being
attacked from water chemistry to changes in the animal species
and the lack of sea ice and actually access,
very often, by Native peoples, or lack of access,
to be able to get to these marine resources in ways
that they've done in the past.
That permafrost-- I want to, again, underscore rising
temperatures and thawing permafrost
are damaging critical infrastructure
and really taking their toll on traditional lifestyle.
We're seeing with the higher emissions scenarios are
looking like for places like Alaska,
up in the northern reaches.
And we're seeing that coming from all over the planet,
actually.
Mounting expenses from the permafrost--
it seems to be too expensive to be able to replace
a lot of the infrastructure.
The housing alone in some of the villages in Alaska,
we are looking at a million and a half dollars per household
to move some of those communities
from the edge of the sea and back further so
that they are not threatening to life and limb of people
and livestock and property.
So we're seeing these things happening all over.
We're seeing the land move.
We're seeing water disappearing, even in traditional places.
We're seeing the sands actually move,
since they lack water and no longer have the dunes anchored.
And we're seeing dust and winds moving those dunes way
across the landscape, across the large reservations,
across large states.
So these are not things that are going to be happening
in the future, as Bull said.
These are things that are happening right now.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate your presentation this evening,
as well as Julie and Bull.
I'm actually going to unmute Julie and Bull's microphone.
Bull, if you would like to unmute the microphone,
and we can take some questions from our audience.
Please feel free to type your questions into the question
pane for any of our presenters.
earlier was regarding fisheries' impacts
for Indigenous populations.
And I will open this up to any one of our presenters
who'd like to tackle it.
Do you have some specific examples
of particular fisheries that are currently
being impacted by climate change and having detrimental effects
on specific Indigenous peoples?
We're seeing that with the large, large schools of salmon
leaving, going up from rivers and communities
where they've been hatched and throughout the sea.
And we're not always seeing them surviving in levels.
We're seeing them being eaten, more so
by other fish, other predators.
We're seeing that this is becoming
a very critical habitat situation, where our food
stocks are not going to be sustained in the ways
that they were with all these kinds of pressures
we're seeing falling upon them.
Any--
Yeah, this is Bull.
And following up on Bob's comments,
too, in terms of specific examples of fisheries,
with the increased acidity in the ocean that is directly
tied to increased CO2 concentrations,
you're starting to see shellfish populations that are--
you're seeing individual shells that
are either heavily degraded or not growing to the capacity
that they once were.
So what we're beginning to see are
trends in fishery populations due to ocean acidification,
as well as temperature.
You're starting to see [INAUDIBLE] of fisheries that
are moving to places geographically
that historically they may not have been, because
as they seeking out those ideal environments.
But those shellfish that pretty much
draw their shell-building materials
from the ocean itself are being jeopardized
because of acidification.
And that's also playing out with the coral reefs
around the world, as well.
And so, for example, also, in the South
where Julie has spoke to you about the shrimping industry,
that both through the impacts of the BP spill
as well as other spills and other anthropogenic influences,
are certainly influencing the food web there as well as
the production that will ultimately land on our tables,
as well.
So we're seeing it across the board.
One question that we had just come in was,
what are some of the most interesting findings
that you actually had to cut out of the final edited
down report?
I remember one in particular, and it
was both an audio and visual interview
with an elder from Alaska.
And he talked about how they relied
on specific environmental cues that would trigger timing
of hunting and gathering and how some of his family members
had actually gone out hunting and, due
to an unseasonal thaw that had occurred
and the torrent of flooding that occurred that was atypical,
how his family got stranded.
And it really became a hazard to try and rescue
their family who had been basically cut off
from supplies and from help, because of unseasonal runoff
and warming.
with some of the recommendations we've
been making to the sustained process, is part of the problem
was the NCA process itself is not
very conducive to including things
like traditional knowledge, oral history, storytelling.
And so so much richness and what was shared with us was not able
to be conveyed, because it was, say, not, quote,
"peer-reviewed."
We were able to include things from workshops
held with communities that the NCA graciously supported.
However, this is part of what Bull spoke to earlier
about the imperfect process.
And to include Indian country and tribal
members in this process, it also needs
to meet them where they are--
and so recognizing that there's not necessarily always a way
to say climate change in an Indigenous language.
But a lot of the stories that were conveyed to us
and told we weren't able to capture
because it didn't fit within the confines of a government
report.
And so I think it also challenges all of us
to conceptualize and work on--
if agencies are reaching out, and they're
mandated or directing directives to work with tribal communities
and include Indigenous voices, what does that mean?
It's not fitting it--
they're trying to fit it into their box and their rules.
But it's understanding how knowledge is shared
and how it's transmitted and how can that type of information
be included in things like this while
also not being co-opted and morphed into something
that it's not.
And thank you, Bull.