Courage on the Frontlines: Alaska’s Youth Sue to Stop Climate Crisis
May 31, 2024
Photo courtesy of Joris Beugels
On May 22, 2024, eight youth from across Alaska, supported by Our Children’s Trust, filed a new constitutional climate lawsuit against their state government. Building on the foundation of more than a decade of Our Children’s Trust’s legal work in America’s Last Frontier, Sagoonick v. State of Alaska II seeks to secure recognition of the youth’s fundamental rights under Alaska’s Constitution and stop the Alaska LNG Project, a massive, state-led fossil fuel infrastructure project that would roughly triple Alaska’s emissions of climate pollution for decades to come.
As members of the youngest generation in one the most ecologically sensitive and fastest warming regions on Earth, the eight youth plaintiffs are on the frontlines of the climate crisis.
Many are from Alaska Native communities and remote villages that rely on the fish and wildlife of surrounding lands and waters to sustain their lives, health, and cultural traditions. With existing levels of climate pollution thawing the permafrost underlying their communities, inundating their homes with increasing floods and storm surges, filling their lungs with smoke from increasing wildfires, and killing the salmon and other fish and wildlife species on which they depend, the youth are already experiencing devastating harms to their health, safety, and cultures from existing levels of climate pollution.
To highlight the story of just one of the eight remarkable youth, take seventeen-year-old Jamie T., who lives in Kasigluk, along the banks of the An’arciiq River. Like many villages in Alaska, Jamie’s community sits on permafrost, which has provided stability to the riverbank and the land on which Kasigluk was built for generations. Now, warming driven by climate pollution is thawing the permafrost and causing increasing flooding, sinking Jamie’s house into the tundra and accelerating erosion and land loss from the riverbank right outside her door. Her house used to be separated from the river by eighty feet of land, but erosion driven by climate pollution has taken so much soil that the river now flows directly underneath Jamie’s porch, kitchen, and part of her living room.
In keeping with the traditions of her Yup’ik ancestors, who have inhabited the region for thousands of years, Jamie relies on the bounty of the local lands and waters surrounding Kasigluk for subsistence. She fishes for salmon, whitefish, and pike, gathers berries, celery, sour dock, and other plants, and hunts for birds and moose. She also relies on the seal, walrus, and other fish, game, and fauna that her family and community hunt and gather. However, climate pollution from fossil fuels is harming the abundance and threatening the continuing existence of many of the species Jamie and her village rely on for subsistence. For instance, as warming waters and other climate pollution-induced changes have caused massive die-offs and historically low numbers of salmon in the Kuskokwim River, Jamie and her family have not been able to catch enough salmon to meet their subsistence needs for several years.
Jamie’s experience is representative of the profound dangers that continuing climate pollution poses to Alaska’s youth.
Yet, despite scientific consensus that fossil fuels must be eliminated as rapidly as possible to prevent further and mounting risks of catastrophic harm to the lives, health, and safety of Alaska’s youth, Alaska’s government is moving in the exact opposite direction, continuing to zealously promote fossil fuel development. The largest fossil fuel undertaking the state is pursing is the Alaska LNG Project, a massive infrastructure project designed to unleash colossal quantities of fossil gas locked away in Alaska’s North Slope and deliver them for combustion via a proposed 800-mile pipeline and liquification facility.
At a time when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC has made clear that every additional ton of climate pollution brings further and mounting harm to youth, the Alaska LNG Project would drastically increase Alaska’s climate pollution emissions for decades. Rather than reducing emissions and protecting Alaska’s youth and future generations, Alaska’s legislature has passed laws requiring Alaska’s government to advance and develop the Alaska LNG Project. And so, Jamie and her seven co-plaintiffs are forced to turn to the courts to protect themselves from their own government’s continuing perpetuation of the climate crisis.
In invoking these rights under Alaska’s Constitution, the youth plaintiffs stand on a solid foundation built over the course of more than a decade of previous youth-led constitutional climate cases supported by Our Children’s Trust. Each of these cases secured important rulings and provided guidance that set the new case on a firm platform for a favorable decision.
In Kanuk v. Department of Natural Resources, filed in 2011 and decided by the Alaska Supreme Court in 2014, a group of youth supported by attorneys at Out Children’s Trust challenged the state’s failure to reduce Alaska’s emissions of climate pollution as violating their rights under the state constitution. While the Court declined to resolve the youth’s the claims, the case established that youth suffering climate injuries have standing to sue Alaska’s government to prevent additional climate pollution.
Three years later, in Sagoonick v. State of Alaska I, sixteen Alaska youth challenged the state’s statutory policy of general support for the promotion of fossil fuels as violating their rights under Alaska’s Constitution. In a 3-2 decision issued in 2022, a narrow majority of the Court again declined to resolve the youth’s claims. However, the majority gave clear guidance that a challenge to a particular project, like the Alaska LNG Project, would allow the Court to determine the youth’s rights under Alaska’s Constitution. The two dissenting justices wrote separately to explicitly recognize that Alaska’s Constitution includes a fundamental right to a climate system that sustains human life, liberty, and dignity, stating that it is
“arguably the bare minimum when it comes to the inherent human rights to which the Alaska Constitution is dedicated.”
The new lawsuit, which features several of the same plaintiffs, seeks to enforce the fundamental right recognized by the dissenting justices in Sagoonick I, among other protections afforded by Alaska’s Constitution. A favorable ruling in the case would establish a landmark victory in the fight for climate justice for Alaska’s youth, not only stopping the Alaska LNG Project, but establishing strong constitutional protections for the youth against further substantial contributions to the climate crisis by Alaska’s government.