Case Studies
Research and Development - ICARIS
Location: Ketchikan, Alaska, USA
Date: 2020
Project Summary
Climate Impacts on Tribal ways of Life in Southeast Alaska and How Traditional Ecological Knowledge Can Provide a Path to Resilience – A NASA funded project.
TBEC is partnering with the Ketchikan Indian Community (KIC), an Alaska Native Village and federally recognized sovereign nation, to conduct a Community Impact Statement (CIS) to assess climate impacts on Southeast Alaska region and co-develop a tailored and robust Integrated Community Adaptation & Resilience Impact Statement (ICARIS). The KIC represents over 6,000 native people from the Tlingit, Haida and Tshimsian tribes of Southeast Alaska. KIC is the second largest federally recognized descendants of the original inhabitants of the southeast region of Alaska. KIC promotes greater level of understanding and respect for the traditions and cultural heritage of Native Americans and Alaska Natives. This understanding can only come from incorporating contemporary Native perspectives into the interpretation and presentation of Native people’s past and present realities.
KIC is located on Revillagigedo Island in the Alexander Archipelago in Ketchikan Gateway Borough of the southeastern region of Alaska. This area is characterized by a beautiful environment composed of high mountains and rainforest habitat terminating on the rugged coast of the Pacific Ocean’s Inside Passage. It is an environment where a warming climate has already begun to render ground and building foundations unstable, disrupt transportation routes, and trigger extreme hazards, placing coastal communities in imminent danger from flooding and erosion. Additionally, coastal threats lie in increasing acidification of the cold Alaskan waters, unusual harmful algal blooms, and significant reductions in marine wildlife populations due to abnormally high-water temperatures. This project will leverage technologies created by TBEC with traditional insights and co-generated knowledge, strategies, and projects to support the KIC’s future goals and decision-making needs and address these significant challenges faced by the Village.
The primary research objective of this proposal is to integrate co-generated Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with cutting edge climate modeling and projections to create a meaningful, actionable, and holistic assessment of climate impacts on the KIC. This research will build upon TBEC’s previous CIS and ICARIS research, enabling the KIC to identify climate vulnerabilities and opportunities, develop plans for mitigation of climate risks, evaluate management options for adapting to these risks, and implement successful strategies that result in increased community resilience. The project will focus on three main objectives to achieve this goal.
Objective 1: Generate a Climate Impact Statement (CIS) for the Southeast Alaska Region. Actionable climate information is vital for comprehensive community planning and understanding the risks and vulnerabilities posed to any community. Current climate and environmental data are outdated or sometimes nonexistent and preventing Alaskan communities from effectively participating in resilience building activities, competing for funding opportunities that require current metrics, and designing long-lasting adaptable projects. TBEC staff will combine modern climate models, geomatics,
and geodesign to develop applicable data on potential environmental risks to the Southeast Alaska region over the next 10, 20, 50+ years.
Objective 2: Engage Culture Bearers and Boundary Organization Stakeholders to Generate TEK and determine how climate impacts affect socioeconomic and cultural processes, and ecosystem services. TBEC researchers, the KIC Co-I, and community members, through TEK, will identify environmental changes that represent a vulnerability or opportunity depending on how the resources are used, the perceived effects on cultural and subsistence lifestyles, and how these may change over time. Crucial to this endeavor is collaboration with Native Alaskan Villagers, who are the citizen-scientists and the social scientists who will inform the project’s key outcomes in conjunction with an interdisciplinary team of scientists who will contribute their areas of expertise for a highly integrated, holistic project. KIC staff will utilize TBEC’s engagement and interview expertise and project funding to involve young community members (high school students) to collect and document TEK from culture bearers, hunters, gatherers, and other important community members. The funding from the NASA program will generate a cultural information collection program within the community that can be continued in the future past the project end to strengthen cultural practices and community ties between elders and younger generations. This information will remain a significant resource within the Village for generations to come and will help inform current and future planning.
Objective 3: Develop an Actionable Planning Resource (ICARIS) that Assesses Climate Impacts on Socioeconomic Processes, Cultural Practices, and Ecosystem Services and Resilience-building Mitigation Strategies. Building on the work in Objectives 1 and 2, we will use TEK, climate models, and perceived vulnerabilities and risks to develop a decision-making framework that incorporates acceptable risks and policy constraints. The needs of the KIC will be assessed by team members and, through workshops and collaborative meetings, the team will identify and quantify implementable management options, policies, strategies, and projects. Additionally, the team will evaluate the success of the selected actions in increasing village resilience and sustainability while reducing future monetary and cultural losses, resulting in ready and actionable solutions for the KIC and a dynamic planning document that can be easily updated as climates shift.
These objectives address fundamental socioecological systems science questions about how indigenous people use their natural resources, perceive the threats from climate change, and how they plan to adapt to increase resilience given the uncertainties of a changing climate. The research also develops the resilience of Alaska Native Communities who are at the forefront of climate change, thereby advancing methods in theory regarding Arctic social systems science.