Abstract
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).
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, KMF. The data are not publicly available due to privacy restrictions.
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We thank Dr. Jessica Taylor for her role in data collection.
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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (grant nos. 2127353, 928105).
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Communicated by Angus Naylor.
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Synopsis
This study determined how development actors’ source of funding is associated with barriers to adaptation of infrastructure.
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Brown, M.J., Passalacqua, P., Poleacovschi, C. et al. Adaptation challenges experienced by entities serving Alaska Native village infrastructure needs. Reg Environ Change 24, 88 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-024-02245-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-024-02245-0