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Rural communities is Alaska—predominantly Alaska Native Tribes—are at the forefront of climate change impacts and climate justice concerns in the United States. According to the 2019 Alaska statewide threat assessment report, 29 communities are currently experiencing significant climate change-related erosion. Further, 38 communities faces significant flooding, and 35 have major problems with thawing permafrost. Some Alaska Native communities have explored community relocation to adapt to these impacts. Because federal law does not recognize gradual environmental impacts like thawing permafrost and coastal erosion as disasters, these communities are ineligible for disaster funding and struggling with how to adapt to the very urgent—albeit less immediate—issues that they face.This article analyzes the chalenges of Alaska Native Tribes attempting to access federal assistance for community relocation. While some posit that the federal trust responsibility for Tribal Nations might help leverage federal help with community relocation, the status of Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) extinguished almost all claims of aboriginal title and reservations in Alaska. General access to federal disaster funding and programs may be another avenue for assistance; however, the limited definition of "disaster" and overly burdensome requirements for federal programs mean that many Alaska Native communities are left to struggle on their own.In response to these challenges, this article explores possible solutions to help these communities with their relocation efforts. It examines the newly adopted Building Resilient Communities and Infrastructure Program as a potential funding opportunity for community relocation efforts, along with programs focused on climate justice. Finally, the article concludes by proposing the expansion of a state role in helping coordinate federal grant programs on behalf of Alaska Native Tribes and the funding of resilience officers by the federal government at regional Alaska Native organizations to navigate requirements for community relocation grant programs.

Empirical research on migration has historically been fraught with measurement challenges. Recently, the increasing ubiquity of digital trace data-from mobile phones, social media, and related sources of 'big data'-has created new opportunities for the quantitative analysis of migration. However, most existing work relies on relatively ad hoc methods for inferring migration. Here, we develop and validate a novel and general approach to detecting migration events in trace data. We benchmark this method using two different trace datasets: four years of mobile phone metadata from a single country's monopoly operator, and three years of geo-tagged Twitter data. The novel measures more accurately reflect human understanding and evaluation of migration events, and further provide more granular insight into migration spells and types than what are captured in standard survey instruments.

Greening the unused or inefficient land surface is of vital importance to increase the carbon pool in environmentally fragile but depopulated rural areas. A proactive land-use strategy, rural residential land decrement (RRLD), is triggered by rural land abandonment and can contribute to greening the land surface. A RRLD can be designed and implemented according to the specific regulations and rules and linked to regional environmental change. However, the carbon consequences of implementing multi-scenario RRLDs remain unknown. Thus, this study exemplifies a rural county of China, proposes a framework that illustrates how spatial zoning, decision model, and prediction techniques jointly determine the RRLD, and accounts for the associated carbon emissions under three scenarios. The results demonstrate that half of the 2012.23 hectares of RRLs were recommended for conversion to farming or gardening use. Under the scenarios of agricultural priority, compact ecological priority, and complete ecological priority, the change of carbon emission capacity in one township could be up to 77.41 tCO2 yr−1, −172.32 tCO2 yr−1, and −209.07 tCO2 yr−1. The total change of Fang's carbon budget ranged from −1179.91 tCO2 yr−1 (sequestration) to 461.53 tCO2 yr−1 (emission). The findings provide a practical paradigm for utilizing land-use strategies to improve the carbon-related environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With rapid industrialization and urbanization in China, a large rural population has migrated to cities and left their rural homestead land (RHL) idled. Land use policy on RHL utilization is crucial to the efficient use of land resources. However, due to farmers' limited knowledge of regulations and lack of participation in rural land governance, their preference is sometimes overlooked in the policy-making process. The purpose of this paper is to examine farmers' preferences for the two primary RHL utilization programs, i.e., transfer and surrender. We conducted a farmer household survey of 405 households in rural areas in Changchun at Jilin Province, China in 2018 and estimated farmers' willingness to participate in the mechanisms using a bivariate ordered probit model. Various options under the two mechanisms are also investigated. We find a positive correlation between rural households' willingness to participate in these two mechanisms. This is the first comprehensive study taking into consideration the correlation and tradeoff in farmers' choice between the two mechanisms. The results shed light on the heterogeneity of households' needs and interests in RHL utilization, an important component to be considered in rural development policy-making decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]