A Yupik girl rides her bike late in the evening on July 3, 2015, in Newtok, Alaska. Newtok is one of several remote Alaskan villages that is being forced to relocate due to warming temperatures which is causing the melting of permafrost, widening of rivers and the erosion of land and coastline.

(Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

At a Glance

Seventeen communities are being forced to relocate because of climate change, a new report says.Coastal villages forced to leave are learning that moving from their homes comes with many challenges.

Researchers studying climate change have long concluded that tens of thousands of U.S. residents living in coastal communities from Florida to New York will be forced to leave their homes in the coming decades as sea levels continue to rise. A new report, however, says 17 communities are already facing that reality.

According to the (CPR), the majority of thesecommunities that are being forced to move are inhabited by native Americans and Alaska natives living near coastal resources.

"Native Americans and Alaska Natives vulnerable to sea level rise may live close to coasts because of the cultural and economic importance of coastal resources or because the federal government forcibly settled them on tracts of land that were much smaller and more marginal than their original homelands," the report notes.

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Being forced to move from a threatened community, like residents in the tiny villageof Newtok, Alaska, where the Yipak people have lived for thousands of years, comes with a slew of challenges, including coming up with the financial means to leave one home to establish a new one somewhere else.

"Community displacements due to climate change are about so much more than moving possessions and finding new homes,” co-author and CPR member scholar Maxine Burkett . “They uproot entire communities and tear at the fabric of life while threatening cohesiveness and culture, as well as doing harm to individuals, families, and businesses. However, migrations and relocations don't have to be chaotic if communities have the funding and other resources needed to take advantage of the tools for acquiring new land and reestablishing their communities in safer, more secure areas."

The village of Newtok, Alaska, is seen from a plane on June 29, 2015. The Yupik people have lived on the coastal lands along the Bering Sea for thousands of years but must now relocate because of climate change. According to the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, the high point in Newtok - the school - could be underwater by the end of the year.

(Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Some of the more promising legal tactics suggested in the report to secure new land for communities forced to leave includes litigation on some unresolved claims to land once owned by tribal communities andlooking to the courts tosecure new land for relocation.

Some policy tools included in the report are federal assistance programs such as a federal disaster declaration, grant or loan programs or housing buyouts.

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One such community, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe on Louisiana's Isle de Jean Charles, has been awarded a$48.3 million grant from U.S. Department ofHousing and Urban Development to help relocate some 60 residents to higher and more stable ground from itsland inTerrebonne Parish.

The authors note that the 17 communities named in the report are "at the cutting edge" of devising techniques to maneuverthrough the challenges and policy issues that will soon affect thousands of Americans.

Loyola University law professor Robert R.M. Verchick and one of three authors of the study told nola.com that the study for political leaders to realize that climate change will affect thousands of Americans and strategies must be discussed and formulated, sooner rather than later.

"We are talking about a future where tens of thousands of people are going to be relocating, and yet we have no uniform strategy," Verchick said. "And that's a conversation we're almost not having at all in the Unites States right now."

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