Barack Obama closed out his visit to Alaska on Wednesday, promising to provide remote native villages with both 20th-century standards of flush toilets and sanitation and much-needed protection against the 21st-century consequences of climate change.
Ahead of a last stop in Kotzebue, a community of 3,000 north of the Arctic circle, the White House pledged $17.6m to help bring flush toilets and safe drinking water to 17 remote communities.
Obama also promised $2m, through the state’s Denali Commission, to help those remote coastal communities which have chosen to relocate because of climate change.
More than two dozen native Alaskan villages which are losing the land out from under them to coastal erosion and sea-level rise, are actively considering moving because of climate change.
The visit to Kotzebue would take Obama farther than any other president to a meeting with indigenous people on their home terrain. In Alaska, that often means conditions that would shock other Americans.
Preparations for Obama’s visit to Kotzebue, a native Inupiat community that ranks as a hub for north-western Alaska, involved hauling away 100 truckloads of rubbish and about 100 rotted cars that had been abandoned for decades, according to local press reports.
Even before he left the state, the president was winning praise for acknowledging remote Alaskan communities facing new challenges from a melting Arctic.
Robin Bronen, director of the Alaska Institute for Justice, which received some of the funds, said the money was an important first step to helping native Alaskans deal with the immensely daunting prospect of relocating from lands they have hunted and fished for, in some cases, thousands of years.
Until now, villagers were left on their own to plot their escape.
“This is the most complicated and controversial issue for any government anywhere in the world to figure out: how communities are going to relocate because of climate-change impacts,” Bronen said.
The first task was for the villagers to figure out when and how they needed to leave their ancestral lands – to avoid a potential climate-charged disaster.
Marilyn Heiman, who heads the Arctic programme for the Pew charitable trusts, said the focus on native Alaskans dealing with real-time climate change was the most striking aspect of the Obama visit.
“The most important thing he said was that we have to work and consult more closely with tribes and communities,” she said.
“Basically, it’s third-world conditions in a lot of these communities and anything they can do to help improve those conditions will help the health and safety of the people there.
“I am certain it’s not adequate but it’s a start … to deal with the water and the flooding and erosion.”
The attention was also backed up with infusions of federal funding, Heiman said.
“We haven’t seen money like that since Ted Stevens,” she said.
Stevens, a legend in Alaska, helped the territory gain statehood. As a long-serving Republican senator, he channelled federal funds to the state.
For all Alaska’s oil wealth, many conditions in remote locations remain much as they have for years.
About a third of the people in the Alaskan Arctics have no access to indoor plumbing, according to the Census Bureau. In many villages, the toilet is a five-gallon “honey bucket”, dumped out in a sewage lagoon on the edge of the village.
Many villages have no safe drinking water. Stomach illnesses and other health problems are rife – and yet villages have only the most sporadic access to doctors or nurses, and are a bush flight or snow mobile ride away from modern healthcare.
Most villages rely on subsistence – hunting and fishing – and poverty and social problems are rife.
Even those conditions are deteriorating, as buildings collapse into melting permafrost and sewage lagoons overflow because of coastal erosion and increasingly severe storms. The wildlife that is the basis of the subsistence economy is also growing scarce because of climate change.
