Hi,

I am an environmental and natural resource economist who studies the effects of projected climate change on our state’s built environment. The built environment in my current project includes bridges, roads, water/sewer, and many different types of buildings.

Prior to arriving in Alaska, I was an economist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (Boulder, CO USA) where I built sophisticated models to study the effects of weather variability on the U.S. economy.

As a researcher who works in the arctic where these changes seem to be the most pronounced, I am happy to write in to climate commons to report on my observations.

I chaired the science Working Group for an international conference of arctic indigenous peoples called Snowchange in August of last year (www.snowchange.org). There were several other working groups. Indigenous leaders from Greenland to Siberia gathered to share their stories of what they are seeing in changes to fish, wildlife and habitat. The list of observed changes grows longer each year:

–beaver are now in the arctic as the tree line moves north

–salmon are showing up with lesions and parasites in greater frequency

–weather is much more unpredictable, causing danger and death to hunters

–more and more salmon are appearing in the Chukchi Sea

–water levels in lakes and rivers are going down

–permafrost is melting

–reindeer are having difficulty accessing forage due to freeze-thaw-freeze cycles,

covering tundra with ice

–migratory birds are arriving earlier and leaving later

I am an Alaska Native, an Aleut, born and raised in the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea off the west coast of Alaska. My people have lived in intimate connection with the Bering Sea for almost ten thousand years, and we are still here with our connection still strong. Because of our intimate connection, we are able to notice the subtlest changes to the Bering Sea, and the fish and wildlife dependent on it, long before any highly trained scientist. Aleuts of the Pribilof Islands first noted anomalous things about wildlife that indicated that food stress was likely beginning and that this was likely an ecosystem-wide phenomenon. St. Paul Island, my home and home to some 500 Aleuts, was truly a magical, mystical place, hidden from the world by dense blankets of fog throughout the summer months. St. Paul was home to some of the largest cliff nesting seabird colonies in North America, two and a half million strong. And it was also the home of some 1.2 million northern fur seals (the largest fur seal colony in the northern hemisphere), as well as thousands of steller sea lions. In 1977, our people noted adult birds with their breast bones protruding, with chest muscles “caved in”; murre and kittiwake chicks (cliff nesting seabirds) falling off of cliff ledges and dying in larger numbers than normal; fur seal pelts so thin that we could see light through them when the fat was fleshed off; and sea lions chasing after and eating fur seal pups in greater frequency than any other time in living memory. From this, Aleuts knew that there was big trouble, and that it encompassed the entire Bering Sea because near-shore foragers, distance foragers, depth foragers, and surface foragers were all indicating food stress. Indeed, since this time, these animals having been precipitously declining in populations.