Alaska

The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) and Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals (ITEP) provided 3 tribal climate adaptation planning trainings in Alaska from 2016 to 2017 (two jointly sponsored trainings in 2016 and 2017 and a 2017 training sponsored by ANTHC). This report summarizes findings from a web-based questionnaire distributed to tribal participants who attend these trainings to understand what additional resources and support they want to help their climate adaptation planning eforts. Findings are based on the analysis of 21 responses.

The Action Plan will empower our people to seek reform and justice as we collectively work towards securing access and management rights over our traditional food resources and to create long-term systematic and policy change that will advance food sovereignty and benefit Inuit communities throughout our four regions of Alaska.

Will the warming Arctic transform into a peat- and carbon-rich landscape, as the boreal zone is now, or are there essential conditions lacking in a warming Arctic that will prevent this?

“TEK Talks: Working with Indigenous Peoples" was a successful virtual lecture series on DEI topics and research ethics. It was hosted by the Geophysical Institute Graduate Student Association (GIGSA) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) by two graduate students, Margaret, who is Alaska Native, and Anika, an international student from Germany. The series was in part a response to the letter from Western Alaskan Indigenous leaders criticizing NNA. This poster presents lessons-learned from our experience hosting TEK Talks to encourage others to create their own DEI lecture series.

Rivers and floodplains are particularly susceptible to a warmer climate due to permafrost thaw that can lead to accelerated erosion. This erosion threatens critical infrastructure and disrupts community life. Here we summarize objectives and early findings from a new NNA project to understand riverbank erosion and its impact on contaminants including heavy metals, such as mercury, along with carbon, nutrients and pathogens.

Rural communities in Alaska face many housing challenges. Existing housing is generally older, overcrowded, inefficient, and poorly equipped to withstand extreme weather conditions. These challenges result in a high energy burden on homeowners, as well as indoor environmental quality challenges. While there has been substantial efforts to support weatherization to mitigate energy inequality in these communities, the efficacy, service life, and homeowner use of such energy efficiency improvements can be better understood in order to drive further improvements to such programmatic efforts.

Here we present preliminary planning work to inform village and regional decision making on mitigation and adaptation strategies. This work has been completed in collaboration with communities on the Kuskokwim River between 2021 and 2022, with the goal of co-generating a research design and approach for a multi-site study integrating local knowledge, Indigenous science, and western science.

Funded in 2019, the NNA Track1 project, Landscape Evolution and Adapting to Change in Ice-rich Permafrost Systems (NNA-IRPS) aspired to work with the Native Village of Point Lay and several regional partners to determine the best ways to engage the community in research and to ensure the research questions themselves and the data produced will be useful at the local and regional level.

Rural Alaskan communities experience significant challenges in developing and operating water and sewer infrastructure systems. Their remote location, freezing temperatures, and regulatory hurdles often inhibit their ability to provide adequate water services. Moreover, engineered water systems are sometimes designed without using local knowledge and experience. Finally, training and certification requirements are often unreasonable and not suited to the local population, creating a gap in the local workforce.