Giving Compass' Take:

• Ramin Skibba shares how Dahr Jamail, author of The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, explored the consequences of climate change that Arctic communities are enduring.

• How can funders help disadvantaged communities survive and thrive in a changing climate? 

• Learn about using evidence to prioritize and address environmental risks. 

The Aleutian people of the tundra-covered Alaskan island of St. Paul, hundreds of miles from the mainland, used to count on giant rookeries of northern fur seals every year for pelts and meat. They hunted plenty of fish and birds, too, but their sources of food, especially the once iconic fur seals, have drastically dwindled, transforming their way of life.

Many St. Paul residents now attribute the vanishing fur seals to climate change—or “climate disruption,” as Dahr Jamail, an environmental journalist and mountaineer, often calls it. Instead of a looming, abstract threat projected sometime in the future, climate change now affects people living near the poles in visible ways. These changes in the Arctic don’t stay in the Arctic, as climate effects inevitably travel down to lower latitudes, but people in the northern parts of the world live on the front lines of a warming, melting and morphing planet.

To see climate change in its most turbulent form, Jamail traveled to visit the Inupiat people living in Utqiagvik (formerly known as Barrow), the northernmost town in the United States at the tip of Alaska’s North Slope. For centuries, communities in this remote outpost depended on hunting bowhead whales and seabirds, but like in St. Paul, subsistence living has become increasingly difficult. The few whalers left need larger boats to navigate rougher seas, thanks to bigger waves produced by receding ice, and they have to go after smaller, younger whales whose weight will not break through the thin ice sheets while they are butchered.

While the lower 48 have warmed about two degrees Fahrenheit, Utqiagvik has warmed one degree every decade since 1950, says Stephanie McAfee, a climatologist at the University of Nevada, Reno. And those higher temperatures come with serious consequences. The population of some 4,400 people has to deal with a shorter snow season peppered by occasional heavy blizzards, melting permafrost and the sinking infrastructure built upon it, and further reductions of sea ice removing a buffer that protected the shoreline from erosion as sea levels rise. As Jamail recounts in his book, Cindy Shults, a staff member of KBRW radio in Utqiagvik, witnessed the baseball field where she used play as a child gradually devoured by the ocean.

Read the full article about climate change in Arctic communities by Ramin Skibba at Smithsonian.