The Alaskan island that is disappearing into the ocean due to climate change
Video report from ITV News' Washington Correspondent Robert Moore
As US President Barack Obama visits Alaska to highlight how climate change is eroding the state's coastlines, ITV News speaks to villagers who are directly impacted by global warming.
Flying into the tiny island of Kivalina it becomes immediately obvious what the issue is.....there's not much left of it.
Encircled on one side by the Bering Sea and the other by a lagoon, this isolated island on the West coast of Alaska, 83 miles above the Arctic circle is slowly eroding into the ocean.
For its 400 residents there is no 'debate' to climate change, it's been happening in front of their eyes for the past 20 years.
"We're an adaptable people, we adapt to changes," says Colleen Swan, who leads the relocation project for the village.
"Our people were migratory until we were forced to settle on this little sand spit. But it's really hard to adapt anymore because the changes are so drastic, it's getting faster and faster, it's been happening for so many years".
Each resident we speak to cites different example of the changes they see, they are stark and year-round.
Like most other villages on the Alaskan coast, this community is subsistence-based, relying on what they can hunt and gather to keep themselves fed during the year.
In Spring the whaling season upon which their community has depended for generations has been badly impacted as warming seas thin the ice, making it more dangerous to hunt Bowhead whales, as well as seals and other marine life.
Mayor Austin Swan says: "We don't have the ice conditions we used to have 20 years ago.
"It's not nearly as thick, it's not very stable, you have to be constantly on the watch when you're camping on the ice now because it literally melts from the bottom up. We never used to have to worry about that when the temperature was cold. The ocean's just too warm now to create really heavy ice."
Autumn brings the storms from the West, which many say are getting stronger and batter the tiny island, stealing away feet at a time.
In years gone by the sea would have started turning slushy with ice by October, creating a natural buffer. Yet this now rarely happens before December, leaving the vulnerable coastline at the mercy of the waves.
The first realization that things were really bad came in 2004, when a storm in October washed away feet of the island before the residents' eyes.
Sandbags were put down to keep the sea at bay until in 2009 the Army Corps of Engineers built a rock revetment around the East end of the island buying them "5-10 years". That time is running out.
Longer Summers, rain in January, new species of plants, changing migration habits of animals on land and sea, the melting permafrost, this is among some of the evidence pointed to by a community who say that the climate change is undeniable.
Colleen Swan describes those changes like a moving train that's building up speed.
"It's not just the melting ice and eroding land, everything is changing, you can't even list all of them.
"Every time we think we've seen all the changes something else happens. It's something you wake up to, it's not something that someone has to convince you about because you see it all the time and it's our reality," she says.
Kivalina has been leading a long campaign to try and relocate, forced to confront the fact that it will be underwater in the next 10 years.
Yet it remains stuck in purgatory, unable to raise the funding to move the village to higher ground, but trapped on an ever decreasing landmass with its landfill disappearing into the ocean and devoid of infrastructure, such as basic sewage works, because who would invest in a community whose days are numbered?
The village has often been seen as a poster child for climate change in Alaska and beyond, yet its plight is far from unique.
In 2003 a Federal Government survey found that the future of 180 of the 200 villages that dot the Alaskan coast were threatened by the same problems. Kivalina may simply just prove to be the first in a long line of victims.
It's why President Obama wanted to visit here as part of his three-day trip, his White House team even did a recce and even tried to land a plane on the runway here (the runway's also feet away from falling into the sea).
It's all too much for one of the village elders, Lucy Adams, who has barely left the island during her 82 years.
Ms Adam says: "Does Kivalina have a future? Are the leaders looking at us like we have a future or maybe they don't care? We try to fight for our future, for our younger generation but who's believing us. There are lots of little children here in the village. If we keep losing, if they read their history they'll say 'Ah our grandparents did not fight for us'. That's what they will say because we keep losing, we try to fight but we keep losing."
Colleen Swan will be one of a small delegation from the island to fly to meet President Obama on Wednesday in Kotzebue.
She welcomes his visit, but has a message to give him and to other world leaders due to meet this November in Paris.
She says: "Talk is cheap, you know them by their actions. People who are in power, all over the world, they have the power to change things, yet they continue to make decisions that continue to make the problems worse.
"We're beyond the point of talking about long-term solutions. The damage is going to get worse before it gets better. We're never going to see the world that we grew up in, we're not going to see that again so right now we need short-term solutions."
And for those who continue to deny climate change exists?
"People can deny it, that's up to them, but they're not doing any good for their own children, for their grandchildren," she says.
She urges them to come and live in Kivalina and to witness the changes first-hand.
"As John Keats said 'Nothing becomes real until it's experienced'."
Words by Matt Williams