How We Work

Pacific Environment is Protecting the Fragile Arctic for Future Generations

Arctic communities are on the front lines of climate change, reporting dramatic shifts in temperatures and migration patterns. In a twist of dramatic irony, oil companies have moved aggressively in recent years to access oil and gas reserves -- oil and gas that will in turn speed up the effects of climate change -- in the very place most affected by melting polar ice and warming waters. Indigenous communities on both sides of the Arctic, including Alaska's North Slope and Russia's Sakhalin Island, for decades have watched their pristine homelands and traditional fishing and hunting grounds be sacrificed to oilfield development.

Pacific Environment provides direct support to communities and local organizations on both sides of the Arctic to strengthen coalitions, facilitate local community involvement in international processes, and to engage in direct advocacy.

With our partners in Alaska , we are safeguarding habitat for bowhead whales, polar bears, walrus, seals, seabirds, and fish. By working directly with native community groups, we are more effective to prevent offshore oil and gas extraction in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. In Russia, we support local groups to conduct monitoring of walrus haul-outs to determine the extent of the impact of climate change on Pacific walrus.

We facilitate cultural and informational exchanges across the Arctic to strengthen ties between these communities in an effort to foster supportive relationships across the Arctic and identify opportunities for collaboration. We have brought Indigenous leaders from the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope to meet with the Evenk tribal community, a traditional reindeer-herding culture, in the Sakha Republic, Russia; we hosted Evenk leaders from the Sakha Republic in Barrow, Alaska to discuss their respective communities' approaches to protecting sacred traditional lands, participation in decision-making processes regarding natural resource use, and community leaders' experience negotiating with resource extraction companies and monitoring industrial projects; and to share the effects of hydrocarbon extraction on Indigenous reindeer economy.

Why We Are Effective

We work with partner NGOs and community groups in both the U.S. and Russian Arctic—bringing native leaders, fishermen, government managers, and scientists together—to monitor climate change and to fight irresponsible resource extraction in the Arctic.

For more information about our work in Alaska's Arctic, click here or contact Carole Holley, Alaska Program Co-Director, at cholley "at" pacificenvironment.org.