Building climate change resilient houses for Alaskan Natives

Mountain Village, Alaska, which accommodates 855 residents, are sinking due to thawing permafrost. Ninety per cent of people living in Yupik village are Native Americans.

They lived in these 1970s homes brought to the village during the trans-Alaska oil pipeline boom, making the country a petroleum state. 

The problem with these houses is that they were designed for warmer temperatures and not for Alaska’s subarctic climate. These houses are improperly insulated, burdening families with very high heating bills and prone to moulds that made respiratory illness endemic in Alaska, especially among indigenous children.

The permafrost is layers of frozen organic materials covering 80% of Alaska that are rapidly melting, speeding up the destruction of any structure built on it, including the pipelines.

In Alaska, 80% of its land consist of permafrost, or layers of organic materials.  Decades of permafrost thawing eroded the land and destroying houses and structures built on it – cracking windows, splitting floors, and making these houses impossible to live in, especially during sub-zero temperatures. 

[...]

To know more about the challenges of Mountain Village residents and what CCHRS is doing to help them, read the entire article:

And to know more about what the CCHRS is doing and its projects, check out their website: