CIVIC-PG Track A: Resilient Arctic Coastal Communities to Coastal Hazards

Warming Arctic temperatures are causing permafrost regions of the far north latitudes to thaw for the first time in millennia. These regions make up a large portion of the world’s northern most coastlines. Permafrost consists of frozen sediments that, when temperatures rise like they are now, causes the ice inside them to melt. Ice-like minerals, called clathrates, that abound in permafrost also decompose and release additional water and methane. The combination of liquefaction of the sediment and corresponding decrease in sediment volume causes deflation resulting in ground instability, subsidence, and accelerated coastal erosion. Erosion along Arctic coasts threatens not only coastal communities, but also installed infrastructure like roads, harbors, airfields, pipelines, and other essential elements of modern civilization. This Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC) planning process brings together university scientists, Arctic indigenous people living on the coast in the North Slope of Alaska and their community organizations, North Slope harbor masters, and other North Slope interested parties to co-design hazard maps that can be used to identify areas in peril, those that will become so in the near future, and areas that would be protected from the impacts of coastal erosion. Such a map will provide a much needed high-resolution tool to help improve coastal Alaskan community resilience and inform their planning and possible relocation of people and infrastructure for the future in a rapidly warming Arctic. The planning team consists of scientists from Penn State and the Universities of Alaska Fairbanks and Alaska Southeast and the following Alaskan entities: IUC Sciences LLC which represents the community of Utqiagvik; the Port Authority of North Slope/Barrow; the Office of Risk Management in the Department of Administration of North Slope/Barrow; and indigenous members of the communities of Utqiagvik, Point Lay, Wainwright, and Kaktovik. All will be part of a 3-day CIVIC planning meeting workshop that will be held at Utqiagvik to define and co-design the map and its analytical tools and user-interface. The map will provide significantly higher resolution than those already available to North Slope communities. Broader impacts of the work include development of a tool that can help inform residents and infrastructure along the North Slope of Alaska about areas at high risk and vulnerability to climate change, improve planning; protection; and relocation of assets and homes to locations safe from flooding, coastal erosion, and subsidence. Impacts also include the training of North Slope residents and land use managers on use of the map and its tools to increase climate resilience of Arctic communities, many of which are inhabited by indigenous people. It will also engage indigenous youth, using the map and its discovery tools to promote interest in, and the mastery of, science and technology concepts. The project team will gain valuable experience working with Alaskan key stakeholders, and North Slope of Alaska communities will see how the transition of foundational research to practice can achieve long-term societal benefits. This CIVIC project focuses on providing high resolution, interactive coastal hazard maps and other on-line tools to help Alaskan coastal communities improve their resilience to the impacts of climate change. More than 200 Alaska Native villages are presently suffering from coastal erosion and flooding; and thirty-one Alaskan villages currently face imminent threats of coastal inundation and need relocation. The goal of this Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC) planning period is to bring together key stakeholders from across the north Arctic coastal area to co-design, with the science team: elements; applications; the user interface; and data visualizations of a high-resolution, coastal, climate hazard map that would be developed and implemented in a follow-on CIVIC proposal. In the course of North Slope hazard map creation, the CIVIC team will use their experience with North Slope indigenous communities to determine the best way to engage far flung rural, low-technology, predominantly subsistence-oriented, Native Alaskan communities and deliver a tool that is useful to them and that they can use to increase their resilience to climate change. The project also establishes effective means and protocols for co-designing, with stakeholders, high-spatial-resolution Arctic coastal hazard maps that simultaneously include the three major types of Alaskan coastal hazards (i.e., coastal erosion, flooding, land subsidence). The project will also explore mechanisms that could provide sustainability and long-term integration of new data into the map. The team will use this experience to see whether the map can be used as a vehicle to determine real and long-lasting community benefits of science/community interactions. Partners in this CIVIC project include university faculty and regional and local governments, civic organizations, and Indigenous communities. Partners include Native Alaskan village corporations, the North slope Port Authority, and other North Slope stakeholders including North Slope village residents. To achieve the planning process goal, a multi-stakeholder meeting will be held in an Alaskan North Slope town to garner community-wide perspectives and work with them to co-design the high resolution hazard map and its attendant applications. This planning process will result in North Slope community access to high-resolution hazard information and technology and training, in its use, to accelerate the learning and technology implementation needed to build more climate-ready Arctic communities. This planning process will also improve the understanding of how community-based efforts can be designed to provide improved nature-based solutions to climate change and will foster and strengthen collaboration between researchers and community stakeholders, develop new collaborations and partnerships, refine the research vision to enable submission of a successful follow-on proposal that will implement the community vision, and provide information to address research questions and develop evaluation methods and measures for the follow-on project.This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program’s Track A. Climate and Environmental Instability - Building Resilient Communities through Co-Design, Adaption, and Mitigation and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy. It was funded by the NSF Directorate for Geosciences and Directorate for Computer Information Science and Engineering.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.