“Alaska is a place in which climate change is already impacting us in very observable ways,” says Byron Mallott, the  Lieutenant Governor of Alaska, in a video interview with Wilson Center NOW.  “We have erosion from sea ice leaving the coast. We have patterns of weather change. We have, in the North Pacific Ocean, ocean water change [and] temperature changes taking place. We have ocean acidification moving further north. We have had impact on fisheries already—economic impact.”

According to Mallott, 30 Alaskan communities are at significant risk due to the effects of global warming, and several of these have already begun relocating. “Such a move—of even a very small village—costs hundreds of millions of dollars and takes a lot of planning,” he says.

Mallott was elected in 2014, along with Governor Bill Walker, as part of the first nonpartisan administration in the history of Alaska. He is an Alaska native who served as clan leader of the Tlingit Raven Kwaash Kee Kwan Clan. He takes a lead role in the administration’s climate change policy and visited the Wilson Center to discuss the steps Alaska is taking to address its changing environment

“The purpose of what we call the CALT, or the Climate Action Leadership Team, is to engage as many Alaskans as possible across our vast state—the institutions, tribal groups—so that every voice that chooses to be involved in climate change can be involved,” he says. “The whole purpose is to have Alaska meet its obligations to both its own citizens and, of course, to the world.”

“In acting to deal with the consequences of a changing climate in our own state,” he says, Alaska has found “that what we do can help others, and we are actively reaching out to other parts of the globe in order to both learn and contribute.”