A small Native American community in coastal Louisiana is to be resettled after losing nearly all its land partly due to rising seas, a first in the United States, Reuters reports.
The band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, a Native American tribe living in the Louisiana coastal wetlands, has lost some 98% of its land since the 1950s.
This is the first time an entire community has had to be relocated due in part to rising sea levels, says Marion McFadden, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The land loss is also due to factors such as erosion and sediment mismanagement, a Louisiana official says.
The band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw have lived and fished on the Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana’s coastal south since the 1800s, a tribe’s spokesman says. But land loss has caused the island to shrink from some 15,000 acres to a strip of about a quarter-mile wide by a half-mile long, a study by Northern Arizona University shows.
From a peak of some 400 inhabitants, only around 100 remain. The loss of land to the sea and houses to hurricanes have caused families to leave, says Boyo Billiot, the tribe’s deputy chief.
“No one likes to leave an area where they have history, a lot of memories,” says Billiot. “We are people of the bayou. Water has played a central role in who we are.”
It’s unclear where the tribe will be moved. Climate advocacy group Climate Nexus says the relocation of the tribe was creating new “refugees” of climate change.
But Louisiana and federal government officials offered a different interpretation.
“We really don’t think of the community as refugees. I think of refugees as being scattered and chaotic retreat. This is a resettlement and we are careful to use that word,” says Patrick Forbes, a Louisiana state official.
The relocation would be subsidized by around $48 million in government funds, says Forbes, and would take a few years to complete.
Louisiana’s coast has been sinking at a fast pace compared to most U.S. coastal areas, a phenomenon officials attribute to sea levels rise but also erosion, the official says. Sea levels have already risen by some 8 inches in coastal Louisiana over the last 50 years or so.
According to a 2014 U.S. government report, as global sea levels continue to rise, relative sea levels rise will be greater along some coasts such as in Louisiana and Texas.
