Pacific Northwest tribes are battered by climate change but fight to get money meant to help them
SEATTLE — Coastal tribes in the Pacific Northwest are experiencing some of the harshest effects of climate change — from rising sea levels to extreme heat — but face a range of bureaucratic barriers to accessing government funds meant to help them adapt, a report published Monday found.
The tribes are leaders in the fight against climate change in their region, but because they seek money for specific projects to address its impacts, such as relocating a village threatened by rising waters, they often can’t provide matching funds that require large grants or staffing, or they struggle with strict application requirements, the report from the Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative found. When they do receive funding, it’s often a small amount that can only be used for very specific projects, when the work is typically much more holistic, the report found.
“It is challenging to implement projects by aggregating grants that all have different requirements and conditions without adequate staffing,” Robert Knapp, environmental planning manager for the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe in northwestern Washington, said in the report.
The collaboration, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, spent two years conducting listening sessions with 13 tribes along the Pacific coast of Oregon and Washington, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Puget Sound. The communities face significant challenges from coastal flooding and erosion, rising water temperatures, declining snowpack, extreme heat and increasing wildfire risk.
In addition to the financial challenges, interviewees also described not having enough staff to adequately respond to climate change and sometimes not being able to collaborate with state and local governments and universities on this work because of their remote locations. They also said it can be difficult to explain the impacts of climate change to people who don’t live in their communities.
But as they worked to restore salmon habitats damaged by warming waters or relocate their homes, funding shortages and complications posed major concerns.
A representative of an anonymous tribe in the report said it could not hire a grant applicant and had to rely on its biology department to navigate the maze of funding applications. Another spoke of relying on 15 separate funders just to build a marina.
“This is a time of historic state and federal investment in climate action, and tribal priorities really need to be considered as we make decisions about how we’re going to direct that investment,” said Meade Krosby, senior author of the report. “Hopefully this will help inform how this work gets done, how these funds are allocated, so that they’re actually responding to the barriers that tribes face and helping to remove some of those barriers so that tribes can do the good work.”
Most of the tribes included in the report had prepared publicly available reports on the impacts of climate change. Some tribes had also developed detailed plans for relocation as rising waters threatened buildings or even entire villages.
The Quinault Indian Nationon Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, has a plan to relocate its largest community. The multimillion-dollar effort relies on a patchwork of federal and state grants and the constraints that come with them, Gary Morishima, Quinault’s natural resources technical adviser, explains in the report.
Other tribes expressed concerns about competing with other tribes for funding, when cooperation is such a critical part of responding to climate change. Tribal territories share borders and coastlines, and the impacts of climate change on those territories don’t stop at a border, the report pointed out.
Amelia Marchand, a citizen of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and one of the report’s authors, explained that it comes down to the federal government fulfilling its duty of trust to the tribes.
“The treaty needs to support and lift up and make sure that what the tribes need to continue to exist is maintained,” she said. “And that’s one of the problems with not having this coordinated federal response, because different federal agencies are doing different things.”
Millions of dollars have gone to coastal tribes, and the report said much more is needed. The report cited a 2020 Bureau of Indian Affairs report that estimated tribes in the lower 48 states would need $1.9 billion over the next half century for climate change-related infrastructure needs.
Despite all the challenges, tribes in the Pacific Northwest are still leaders in climate adaptation and have much to teach other communities, Marchand said.
“Finding ways to make progress for their countries and communities, despite the setbacks, is one of the most inspiring and hopeful stories,” she said.