Adaptation challenges experienced by entities serving Alaska Native village infrastructure needs

• Published in: Regional environmental change 2024-06, Vol.24 (2), p.88-88, Article 88
• Main Authors: Brown, Meredith J., Passalacqua, Paola, Poleacovschi, Cristina, Albertson, Leif, Faust, Kasey
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adaptation; Alaska; Alaska Natives; Climate Change; Climate Change/Climate Change Impacts; Community; Construction; Coordination; Decision making; Earth and Environmental Science; Environment; Environmental engineering; Environmental impact; Funding; Geography; Infrastructure; Local communities; Nature Conservation; Oceanography; Original Article; Public health; Regional development; Regional planning; Regional/Spatial Science; Retrofitting; Shoreline protection; stakeholders; surveys; Towns; villages
• ISSN: 1436-3798; 1436-378X
• DOI: 10.1007/s10113-024-02245-0

Infrastructure adaptation is critical to Alaskan communities in the face of rapid climate change. Here, infrastructure adaptation refers to retrofitting existing systems and creating new infrastructure that can withstand the dynamic and extreme impacts of climate change. Despite the established urgency to pursue infrastructure adaptation in rural Alaska, these projects are often costly and inefficient due to a myriad of barriers, such as lack of essential knowledge or sufficient financial resources. The barriers experienced by development actors—i.e., external entities or stakeholders with decision-making power that operationalize adaptation projects—are largely unknown. To begin to understand these challenges and how to mitigate them, we observe how characteristics of development actors are related to the barriers to adaptation that they experience. Enabling this study are open-ended responses from a survey that inquired on interagency coordination and barriers to adaptation, completed by regional development actors ( n  = 37) in 2020 and 2021. Our results show that barriers to adaptation faced by development actors are not random and vary according to how their funding is acquired. From this, we recommend the prioritization of Indigenous-led adaptation activity through (1) increased flexible federal funding available to local development actors and adaptation recipients (i.e., local communities) and (2) increased coordination between adaptation recipients and development actors during all stages of the adaptation process (e.g., planning, design, implementation).