Coastal tribes in the Pacific Northwest are set to face some of the most dramatic effects of climate change in the region, from rising seas to more severe storms. The University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group and the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians conducted a series of listening sessions with leaders and citizens of 13 coastal tribes to hear how they were responding to climate challenges. A new report outlines the obstacles tribes described, including struggles to obtain funding and burdensome paperwork, as well as points of success.
Meade Krosby is a senior scientist with UW’s Climate Impacts Group. Amelia Marchand is a senior tribal climate resilience liaison for the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians. They co-led the project and join us with more details.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Coastal tribes in the Pacific Northwest are set to face some of the most dramatic effects of climate change in the region, from rising sea level to more severe storms. But the federal government often provides more roadblocks than help. That’s one of the findings from a new report put out by the University of Washington’s climate impacts group and the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians. They conducted a series of listening sessions with leaders and citizens of 13 coastal tribes to hear how they were responding to climate challenges. The new report outlines the obstacles tribes ascribed, including struggles to obtain funding and burdensome paperwork, as well as points of success.
Meade Krosby is a senior scientist with the Climate Impacts Group. Amelia Marchand is the senior tribal climate resilience liaison for the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians. They co-led this project and they join us now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Meade Krosby: Thanks for having us.
Amelia Marchand: Thank you.
Miller: Amelia, first – So as I noted, their coastal communities are facing some of the most visible and damaging effects of climate change. How might those impacts be more exaggerated for tribal communities that live on the Northwest coast?
Marchand: One of the things that I think it’s important to always remember is the land base that these tribal nations are residing on. And some of those issues of relocation and issues of climate impacts are directly tied to what their jurisdiction is and where they have the ability to use, access, reside on and move to right now. So, because many of these areas are either pretty rural and in locations that might be hard to access – not just hard, but time consuming to access because some of them are very kind of remote coastal areas – that can cause challenges for infrastructure needing to be repaired or maintained or relocated altogether.
Then, in other areas that might be more urban, there’s still issues with jurisdiction because there’s maybe conflicting interests for things like rights of way or access to areas. And it’s really a case by case type of situation and scenario, but it’s never easy for any community or any jurisdiction to try to adapt to climate change as they’re experiencing impacts. I think one of the things that the report shows is just how often those considerations need to be made by these tribal nations.
Miller: Before we dig into some of the really important takeaways and details from the report, I’m just curious, Amelia, what your biggest goal for it was, what you most wanted to accomplish from this project?
Marchand: Well, I think one of the northstars, the guiding points that our project team had was really to listen to what we were hearing from the tribal nations. Not necessarily generate our own findings or our own solutions, but hear what the problems were, what tribes felt the solutions may be and to elevate those issues to really highlight, yeah, these tribes have been doing this, they’ve been in the throes of climate mitigation and adaptation for a very long time. And for that alone, they are leaders in this space. So there’s a lot that other government agencies can learn from these tribes. And at the same time, there’s so much that I think these tribes shared with us that really needs to be considered and leveraged from the federal and state governments, from local jurisdictions in terms of partnerships. So making sure that we were reflecting and elevating what we heard from the tribes was, I believe, one of the strengths and goals that we had throughout this project.
Miller: Meade, the report identified a number of areas where tribes face barriers in the climate resilience, climate adaptation work they’re doing. One of the biggest was funding. What kinds of processes do tribal leaders or tribal governments typically go through when they’re trying to secure funding for projects?
Krosby: Yeah, typically … well, tribes may have their own funding from various tribal enterprises, but also a lot of the funding is external. A lot of the funding ultimately, especially for the really big expensive projects like moving, infrastructure – so any communities directly on the coast who are having to relocate away from sea level – are going to be coming from the federal government and, to some degree, from state governments as well. So most, if not all, tribal nations are doing so much work to identify sources of funding from the federal government and from state governments, and then the very time consuming process of applying for all of these grants, administering these grants, reporting on these grants. It is a very time consuming process to identify, access and administer these funds that are required to do this work, which, again, for moving a whole community, we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars to do that.
Miller: And it’s worth saying for folks who missed a conversation we had back in May … that was when we talked about the Quinault Indian Reservation’s enormous project to move basically an entire village out of fear of rising sea levels and huge storm surges that could inundate that area.
Amelia, sticking with this question of funding, one of the issues mentioned in the report is that there can often be a discrepancy between what a grant giver wants, what often the federal government wants states or Indigenous nations to do with the money it has, and the projects that an individual tribe actually needs money for. What can those mismatches look like?
Marchand: They look like a lot of different things and it’s not just focused on climate change, it can be across the board, whether it’s health priorities that a tribe has. For example, there may be some significant issues on reservations or in tribal communities where diabetes and obesity might be really, really big challenges, but the funding that’s available might not support addressing the needs of those target groups. So for climate change, I think that there’s a lot of funding opportunities and there’s a lot of grant opportunities that, on its face, look great and look wonderful.
One example that I’ve kind of used before is maybe it’s for identifying invasive species of concern in some type of marine environments. But if a tribe is more concerned, if their climate priorities and their food security priorities are more about getting baseline data for species that they want to know about, where their habitats are and how their habitats are being impacted by ocean acidification or water temperature and water quality impacts, but there’s not funding for that, then they might have to get and work with the funders that are interested in invasive species. So that does create a misalignment or sometimes a conflict where those tribal priorities – climate priorities, health priorities, infrastructure needs – might be totally sidelined by what funding sources are actually interested in putting money towards. And that’s an ongoing issue and it’s not just relegated to climate change.
Miller: Well, it does make me wonder, I mean, because obviously at the heart of this particular issue is the entire way that Congress allocates money for everything. And it’s hard to see a solution for this that doesn’t involve a fundamental change in the way our federal government operates on the most basic level. I’m just wondering, Amelia, if you heard potential fixes to this from tribal leaders that you talked to that seem possible, because we’re talking about such a profound piece of the way government works.
Marchand: Yeah, we had so many wonderful conversations during the listening sessions and so much great, great input and responses. And what we tried to do when we were drafting the report was actually to use quotes directly from the individuals that participated in the listening sessions with us. And one of the things that I think folks, if they haven’t already seen the report that they might be interested in is just taking a peek at some of the quotes that were kind of sprinkled throughout the document. We had tribal leaders participate, elected officials, we had technical advisors and citizens participate. And sometimes it’s not very easy for a broad brushstroke to try and say, well, this is the best way to do it. But there’s other efforts being done with other kind of research and more policy aligned entities which, because of the nature of this report and our team on it, we weren’t trying to make policy suggestions or advocate for that. That is something that we actually can see in the future though, working with some partners that might be able to provide those directions.
There’s a project … I’m trying to recall exactly what it’s called. I can’t recall it right now, but they are a group that is providing very specific policy recommendations to address water, clean water access and issues for tribes in Indian Country across the nation. And because the climate issue isn’t just about storm surge, it isn’t just about dealing with erosion or sea level rise, it’s also dealing with entirely new infrastructure needing to be constructed in areas that are going to be beneficial to these tribes – that coincides directly with access to clean water and availability of water for these tribal communities. So there is a lot of what can be learned through work being done by others like that and recommendations in that manner. And I’m really hopeful that some of these issues of the misalignment of funding will be not just food for thought but actually energize action on the issue.
Miller: Meade, as Amelia mentioned earlier, a number of tribes have been real leaders in climate adaptation. What did you hear from folks about successes they’ve had, even if under difficult circumstances?
Krosby: Many of the successes we heard were really sort of the flip-side of the challenges that we heard. So one of the primary challenges is accessing sufficient funding, like the amount of funding that’s needed and funding that’s flexible enough to meet tribal priorities and needs. But on the flip-side of that, the successes that, despite the challenges, the tribes are being successful in going out and applying and finding those funds, applying for them and accessing them. There have been a number of very large grants provided to Northwest tribes on the coast to do some of these big infrastructure projects and relocation projects. Northwest coastal tribes have been really successful, relative to the whole nation in accessing these funds despite those challenges. And of course, it’s still wildly insufficient to what’s required.
Tribal leadership has really been extraordinary. That was something that was mentioned by participants and is really obvious to any of us who’ve been working in the climate space for any number of times. It’s very clear that tribal leaders, not just elected officials, but including tribal staff, including tribal youth and community members, they’ve really been stepping up and making climate change a priority for their tribes, taking action on it, adaptation and mitigation. So tribal leadership has been a huge driver of success for the tribes and really something that all of us can look to in thinking about how other kinds of communities might respond to climate change.
Sharing information with other tribes – there’s been a lot of tribal learning as tribes have taken actions, sharing that information with other tribes to then help support their work. That was mentioned several times where a tribe might have completed a climate adaptation plan to identify their climate risks and what they can do to address them, and sharing that with other communities and tribal nations who then use those to inform their own planning or their own actions. So there are a number of areas where tribes have been very successful in their climate adaptation efforts. And again, a lot of those are sort of the flip-side and in spite of the same areas that are challenges for tribes.
Miller: Meade, just briefly, who do you most want to read this report and how are you going to ensure that that happens?
Krosby: From the beginning, as Amelia mentioned, a key goal of this work is to make sure that tribal needs are heard. Who needs to hear that varies. We were very proactive in getting media attention on the report from the get go, to get it out and to the public so the public can hear. But that served a dual purpose because it also then found its way into government agencies, federal and state. Those are folks we really want to see this, who have a lot of direct responsibilities to tribes, that this can help inform for them to do well.
So, first getting it out in media for people to see, but then we’re gonna be doing much more directed outreach to federal government agencies, state agencies, making sure it gets to congressional offices, state legislatures, legislators, as well as various other kinds of partners that support tribal adaptation. Folks like me who work in universities who might provide technical support to tribes in their climate work. Folks who might be able to support some of the communications needs that were identified. So, it’s a fairly broad audience, but some of the very top priorities are the government agencies at the state and federal level who are really behind some of these barriers and can do something about them.
Miller: Meade Krosby and Amelia Marchand, thanks very much.
Krosby: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Meade Krosby is a senior scientist with the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group. Amelia Marchand is the senior tribal climate resilience liaison for the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians.
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