National Science Foundation, Small Business Innovative Research Phase II Grant: 

The Integrated Community Adaptation & Resiliency Impact Statement (ICARIS) builds on a CIS,  combining geomatics, geodesign, projected future climates, socioeconomic vulnerabilities, and traditional knowledge to increase community biophysical, environmental, and socioeconomic climate resilience. Predicted future climates are used as the driving variables to predict the timing and magnitude of changes in the biophysical processes that lead to increased vulnerabilities to climate change, such as from erosion, flooding, drought, wildfire, water quality, biomass shifts, etc.

 

The biophysical sensitivities are used to develop scenario and sensitivity analysis, which is combined socioeconomic data and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, to develop integrated measurements of climate risks. Benefits of the ICARIS include identifying and quantifying different potential management options and evaluating the success of the selected management actions in increasing village resilience and sustainably while reducing future monetary and cultural losses. ICARIS empowers vulnerable communities to move from reactive to proactive resilient strategies.

The project addresses a widespread challenge among Alaskan villages and other vulnerable communities: climate risk assessments are often costly, complex, and require multiple specialists, which can lead to inconsistent or conflicting results. To respond to the diverse needs identified during Phase I, TBEC developed two distinct service pathways: the Climate Impact Statement (CIS™) and ICARIS™. The CIS evaluates how environmental changes may impact infrastructure and development, while the ICARIS expands on this by incorporating adaptive capacity, infrastructure risk, and stakeholder-defined social vulnerabilities—such as impacts on public health, food security, and cultural practices—guided by Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK).

​

A key differentiator of ICARIS is its emphasis on integrating Traditional Knowledge and lived social experience to make the assessment process responsive to community realities. Whereas the CIS addresses the impact of the environment on the project, minimizing failure or damage to existing or new developments, infrastructure, or lifelines throughout its lifecycle, ICARIS builds on the CIS  estimates of adaptive capacity and risk to infrastructure, by incorporating additional community and stakeholder feedback, as well as TEK to determine the climate risks to socioeconomic factors, including changes in public health, water security, food security (e.g., subsistence), economy, travel routes, and culture. The primary goal is to reduce vulnerabilities and increase resilience across the impacted facility, site and/or environment and community. Project results have been used to reduce the impacts of a changing climate on structures (pipelines, buildings, etc.), transportation routes, human health (e.g. disease vectors), hydrology (e.g. stream flow and water quality), agriculture, forestry, and marine and terrestrial wildlife habitats. Clients have included governments, banks, non-profits and the private sector.

Project Deliverables:

• Hot Day (HD) and Cold Day (CD) thresholds are projected to shift by 5°C to 10°C by 2100 under high-emission scenarios, with CD values increasing more rapidly than HD in many regions.

• Warm Spell Duration Index (WSDI) increases dramatically, especially in the Interior and Southwest, indicating prolonged periods of anomalous heat.         

• Deep Winter Days (DWD) sharply decline, particularly in northern communities, suggesting a substantial loss of extreme cold conditions.

• Heavy Precipitation metrics (Rx1day, Rx5day) and Consecutive Wet Days (CWD) show strong upward trends statewide, increasing flood and erosion risk.