From The Guardian:
Two years ago, Lisa Charles and her family moved from their lifelong home in the town of Newtok, Alaska, to Mertarvik, a 30-minute trip by boat or snow machine depending on the season.
Lisa is a member of one of the US’s first communities of climate transplants, though she is also Yup’ik, a mother of seven, a nonprofit employee, and a political volunteer. Melting permafrost has rapidly accelerated the erosion of the land under Newtok, bringing houses precariously close to the water’s edge.
Going by the photos in the article and Google maps, both the old village and the new village are sited on an archipelago of low-lying islands, which itself is in the middle of an estuary with constantly changing coastlines/river flows; the new village (lower right hand corner) is even closer to the water's edge than the old one (top, centre):
So whatever the real reason for the move (I can't begin to guess), trying to move away from an eroding coastline is not it.
