The climate crisis is often touted as an emergency that needs action now to stave off negative impacts in the future. But for one native community in the U.S., the consequences of climate change are already here.

The community Isle de Jean Charles, a barrier island located in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, where the delta of the Mississippi River opens to thousands of wetlands in the Gulf, is already being forced from their ancestral homes due to rising sea levels and climate change.

What was once a thriving town with 400 residents on 22,000 acres of land -- mostly members of the Charles Choctaw Nation and United Houma Nation -- now the majority of residents have left, as 98% of the island has been swallowed up by brackish waters, shrinking the once 5-mile-wide island to just half a mile and 320 acres.

"This is only the beginning," Torbjorn Tornqvist, a professor of geology at Tulane University, told ABC News. "We're going to see many more communities that are going to disappear."