Arctic Urban Risks and Adaptations (AURA): a co-production framework for addressing multiple changing environmental hazards

Navigating the New Arctic (NNA) is one of NSF's 10 Big Ideas. NNA projects address convergence scientific challenges in the rapidly changing Arctic. The Arctic research is needed to inform the economy, security and resilience of the Nation, the larger region and the globe. NNA empowers new research partnerships from local to international scales, diversifies the next generation of Arctic researchers, and integrates the co-production of knowledge. This award fulfills part of that aim.

Climate change is increasing vulnerability of Arctic urban communities to natural hazards such as unstable permafrost, wildfire, and rain-in-winter events. These hazards put residents and property at risk and impose economic costs, and households, businesses, and governments must adapt to these interacting hazards. This research is developing detailed maps showing how the occurrence of these three natural hazards has evolved simultaneously in the Municipality of Anchorage and the Fairbanks North Star Borough, Alaska, and Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada over the past several decades, and how they might change over the next 40 years. The interdisciplinary research team of economists; permafrost, fire, weather, climate, and environmental scientists; and policy experts conducts transdisciplinary research on Arctic natural hazards and their impacts on the natural and built environments and society. The research team works closely with local governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Indigenous groups, insurance companies, and residents to co-produce knowledge on the costs, risks, and actions taken to mitigate and adapt to these hazards. The team and stakeholders collaborate to determine optimal ways to measure the effects of hazards on society and the built environment, identify trade-offs and interactions, develop a multiple-hazard risk assessment, and generate options for future adaptive planning. This project is one of the first to include effects of climate change on private as well as public infrastructure, a gap which has limited the understanding of effects of climate change in Alaska. Results provide a framework that other Arctic communities can use to assess risks and reduce economic damages due to climate change and provide examples to increase resilience.

Research activities over four years include: (1) spatial modeling and mapping of natural hazards and their interactions; (2) gathering data to assess perceived risks, values at risk, and adaptation costs with interviews, property owner surveys, and citizen science; (3) economic modeling of costs and risks; and (4) developing in a series of scenario planning workshops an adaptive policy framework that can be used to adapt to and mitigate multiple hazards and reduce future costs and risks. The research helps partner communities make better-informed decisions regarding how and where to build and manage public and private infrastructure and finance public services. This framework can be used by other Arctic communities to assess risks and reduce economic damages due to climate change.

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.