Hooligan. Berries. Natural disasters.
Those are among the focus areas of a Chilkoot Indian Association project that aims to respond to climate threats in Haines. The project will lead to a climate adaptation plan rooted in data and projections about how the global phenomenon will manifest in Haines specifically.
“It’s pretty cool. If you ever had a question of, ‘What does that mean here?’ This is the data, as far drilled-down as it gets,” said Jake Bell, who works in the Chilkoot Indian Association’s environmental departments.
“Even within the whole valley, this is just for Haines, for Deishu,” he added, using the Tlingit name for the town.
Bell is part of a small team working on a new effort to write a climate adaptation plan for the tribe. The group gathered in Haines last week to update the community on their progress and solicit feedback.
Trevor Even is a consultant with Adaptation International, a consulting firm the tribe hired to carry out the Bureau of Indian Affairs-funded project. At a public event Thursday evening, Even talked through the hyper-local data and projections he’s helped gather.
As today’s younger generations age, he said, they will live through a multitude of shifts.
“They’ll see different plants in different areas. They’ll see rivers acting and changing in different ways. They’ll see the fresh water boundary maybe changing as the river moves into the bay,” Even said.
“This will be a big part of what it means to grow up here,” he added. “Watching this change and figuring out ways to live and thrive, even amidst it.”
The goal is to identify and respond to potential climate impacts on traditional life and infrastructure in the area. Meredith Pochardt, who works in the tribe’s environmental department, said they held community meetings last fall to identify four main focus areas.
“And those are saak (hooligan), gaat (sockeye), berries, and extreme weather events,” she said.
“This workshop, we are again kind of going over those four different areas with the community,” she added. “And also working on developing adaptation strategies.”
Underpinning those strategies will be Haines-specific data and projections.
For instance, Even projects that average air temperatures will increase by more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit by midcentury and 8 degrees by late century. In turn, hot days will become far more common — we can expect two to three weeks of temperatures in the 90s each year.
Marine heatwaves and atmospheric rivers will intensify, possibly leading to more landslides. Meanwhile, earlier snowmelt, more rain and longer growing seasons will make mismatches between species and their environments more likely.
“Species that normally you only see down near the coast, but not up high, might be moving up. This means that species you normally only see in the transitional forest are moving up into the glaciated areas. But it’ll definitely mean that the glaciated areas will be retreating,” Even said.
“This future is not locked in place,” he added. “But this is our best guess now.”
The project’s end-goal is to use that information to come up with an action plan for how the tribe will respond to looming climate impacts. That should happen by this fall, Pochardt said.
Cindy Price Hagwood participated in this week’s workshop and community conversation. She said she was particularly interested in seeing not only what could change in the Chilkat Valley, but what already has changed.
She also works for the Chilkoot Indian Association, in the traditional food program. She said she’s most concerned about how rising temperatures will affect the foods she’s enjoyed since childhood.
“I have a lot of really good memories of picking berries in this valley and going fishing with my dad and my family, and living this subsistence life,” Price Hagwood said. “I just hope that we can keep those traditions going.”
