ALASKA : FRONTLINE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Twenty weeks of bush flights, ferries, and remote travel carry a carbon footprint the project does not take lightly. Field travel emissions, estimated at 22 tons of CO2e, will be tracked using Wren’s carbon accounting platform. In place of a standard carbon offset purchase, the Great Alaska Project directs its full sustainability budget to Instituto Terra, a reforestation nonprofit in Brazil’s Vale do Rio Doce.
Instituto Terra was founded by photographer Sebastião Salgado and Lélia Wanick Salgado. Both Sebastião Salgado’s photography and his land restoration projects are an inspiration driving this project. Sebastião spent his final decades transforming a barren cattle ranch into a living forest of three million trees, work that continues today under Lélia’s leadership following Sebastião’s passing last year. This contribution will be made in his honor.
a warming arctic
Alaska has warmed 4.2°F since 1970, nearly three times the global average, driving widespread glacier retreat and accelerating ice loss across the state's mountain ranges and coastal regions.
arctic amplification effect
The Arctic Amplification Effect comes down to a simple, self-feeding loop. Bright white sea ice acts like a mirror, bouncing sunlight back into space — but as it melts, it uncovers darker ocean water underneath, which soaks up heat instead of reflecting it. That warmer water melts even more ice, exposing even more dark water, and the cycle keeps feeding itself in an accelerating vicious cycle.
Relocation of Native Villages
Coastal erosion and permafrost thaw have already forced some Alaska Native communities to relocate from their ancestral villages including Newtok & Mertarvik which will be documented as part of this project.
Ecosystem Transformation
Warming temperatures are driving a cascade of ecosystem transformation — shifting boreal forests northward, thawing permafrost that destabilizes the land itself, and reshaping habitats for species like polar bears, caribou, salmon, and walrus, whose populations and migration patterns Indigenous communities have relied on for generations.
tundra carbon feedback loop
Tundra is now catching fire after being too wet to burn for the past 5,000 years releasing stored carbon back into the atmposhere— a single fire in 2007 released as much carbon as the entire Arctic tundra had absorbed over the previous quarter century.
Glacial Retreat and Sea Ice Loss
Alaska is among the fastest glacier-loss regions on Earth. Sea ice is disappearing as well, eliminating natural coastal buffers that protect communities from storm surges and erosion. These effects are accelerating.