Abstract
This article reviews the status of knowledge gaps and co-production process challenges that impede coastal flood hazard resilience planning in communities of northwestern Alaska, where threat levels are high. Discussion focuses on the state of knowledge arising after preparation of the 2019 IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate and highlights prospects to address urgent needs. The intent is to identify some key steps necessary to advance the integration of relevant multidisciplinary observations with flood modeling and infrastructure mapping to co-produce new online hazard and risk assessment tools that inform local community planning and improve science collaboration among Federal, state, and regional partners for enhanced pre-storm preparations and post-storm recovery, including partial or complete relocation. By focusing coastal data integration for delivery of priority geospatial hazard map products through a consistent yet customized approach to adaptation planning, the broad collaborative effort in Alaska may yield a path of stakeholder service delivery that can be applied to many Arctic communities and other vulnerable regions of the world.
Highlights
Coastal areas throughout the world are increasingly vulnerable to rising sea level and storm events that threaten lives and property, destroy infrastructure, disrupt local economies, and alter ecosystem services
Due to a combination of rising sea level, diminished sea ice, changing wind patterns, beach and bluff erosion, permafrost thaw, and anthropogenic stressors, the dangers have become especially acute for many Arctic and sub-arctic communities in Alaska
The U.S Government Accountability Office (GAO), reflecting on the national scale of an emerging problem, recently documented the pressing need for Federal leadership on climate-forced internal displacement already occurring within the United States (U.S Government Accountability Office, 2020)
Summary
Coastal areas throughout the world are increasingly vulnerable to rising sea level and storm events that threaten lives and property, destroy infrastructure, disrupt local economies, and alter ecosystem services. Still problematic is correlating flood hazards with observed and hindcasted changes in relevant environmental forcing variables (such as the duration of the ice-free season, warming permafrost, air and ocean temperatures, changes in wave intensity and direction, and water levels) because of limited local observational data (e.g., marked flood extents and bathymetry) and poor geodetic infrastructure (Alaska Mapping Executive Committee, 2020). For example, by the Alaska Geological & Geophysical Surveys (DGGS), aim to build validation data repositories of known floods at individual communities by compiling and documenting written and oral accounts, photographs, and aerial imagery (dggs.alaska.gov/hazard/coastal/flood-assessment.html) While such information is crucial to model development and validation, flood hazard studies would benefit from a deeper understanding of site-specific conditions that are known and understood by local residents, passed down from one generation to another. We discuss a specific dynamic model system that Arctic communities could use to simulate plausible flood hazards for the near-term planning horizon (2020–2050)
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