Advancing Wildfire Preparedness and Planning takes an in-depth look at the dynamic factors that are impacting wildfire occurrence for the most populated geographic area in the 49th State of Alaska, the Municipality of Anchorage (MOA). The length and severity of recent fire seasons pose a threat to those who have chosen a niche in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) area to call “home.” This report is a “call to action” in many ways, delving into some of the swings in weather patterns caused by climatic change. These subtle changes are at the root of the evolving wildfire danger and its effect on the 291,247 residents (2020 census) of the MOA. The objective of this report is to combine the knowledge of local wildfire managers with some unique geographic information system tools to help analyze and bring a better understanding of what residents can do to mitigate wildfire risk. The lengthening fire seasons, increase in fuel (vegetation) loadings, the upswing in wildfire occurrence statistics and diminishing budgets to provide for mitigation measures pose an increasingly higher risk for the potential loss of life, homes, and infrastructure. Hopefully, the recommendations found in the conclusion of this report will offer residents some clarity as to what should be in the cross hairs of their efforts as they navigate the potentially cataclysmic danger of a major wildfire within the WUI of the MOA.

In 2006, the State of Alaska closed its defined benefit retirement plan and required all newly hired public education employees—mostly teachers—to join a defined contribution plan. This paper examines whether that change in pension structure affected recruitment or retention in Alaska’s public education workforce.

Water quality parameters for temperature, electrical conductivity, dissolved oxygen, pH, and turbidity and ion activity for calcium, chloride, and magnesium were measured during a period of five winters at eight locations along Chester Creek that flows from the Chugach Mountains east of the Municipality of Anchorage through the Municipality to the west into Knik Arm. The goal of the project was to identify the impact of meltwater on water quality due to common winter street treatments. Each year had its unique conditions. Melt events occurred when air temperature reached above freezing which were sometimes accompanied by rain events that enhanced snowmelt. Melt events throughout the season varied between four and nine with no considerable trend over the duration of the project. Maximum snowpack due to record snowfall occurred in winter 2022/2023 and 2023/2024. Electrical conductivity, which measured the total ion concentration in the water, and turbidity, which measured the concentration of particles, showed the major impact on water quality during melt events. Both parameters can be related to street treatments with salt/deicer and sand/gravel which are used on streets, parking lots, and walkways to reduce hazardous conditions, and both parameters generally increase from the east to the west as the creek runs through the Municipality. The highest electrical conductivity and turbidity were measured in the Middle Fork of Chester Creek at the Northern Lights location and directly in storm drainages at the Seward Highway location. The electrical conductivity correlated well with chloride concentration--a major compound of deicing agents and salts. This supports the assumption that the increase in electrical conductivity is due to street treatments. The total amount of ions, derived from electrical conductivity, is related to the area of each sub basin upstream from each sampling location, and indicates that the sub basin of the Seward Highway sampling location contributes fewer total ions to the creek per sub basin area than other sub basins. Comparing the measured values to water quality standards for aquatic life and propagation (18 AAC 70 Water Quality Standards, March 2020), the electrical conductivity should not exceed 1,500 µS/cm, and this value was only exceeded once on March 26, 2021 in the Middle Fork. Turbidity should not exceed background values by more than 10%. Background values for the sampling locations derived from times before freezing and in the absence of rain range from 0.7 to 5.17 NTU from east to west. Values measured during melt events and summer rain events frequently exceeded this water quality standard.

Alaska is the most aviation dependent state in the United States of America, with almost a quarter of the population and the majority of named communities lying off of the limited road system. The importance of reliable aviation transportation, and the infrastructure underlying these networks, is paramount for these communities. However, the vast distances, remoteness, and rugged environments that make aviation so critical also make maintaining aviation infrastructure particularly challenging. The goal of this report is to serve as a reference document for mapping outages in a subset of core aviation infrastructure – aviation weather stations. We have gathered what we believe is a complete outage history of the 151 “Automated Weather Observation Stations” (AWOS) and “Automated Surface Observation Stations” (ASOS) units in the state from primary Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and National Weather Service (NWS) outage records over the period of January 2019 to November 2023. By mapping them over space and time, and linking to the key hub-and-spoke aviation supply chain networks in the state (e.g. USPS Bypass Mail) and well as populations of communities served, we underscore the protracted impact of infrastructure outages on Alaska’s remote and predominantly Native populations in off-road communities. This analysis should help policymakers in this critical period of investment prioritization, following injections of capital investment funding from the Don Young Alaska Aviation Safety Initiative (DYAASI) within the 2024 FAA Reauthorization Bill. We conclude by outlining key ongoing extensions of this analysis, with direct hypotheses to be tested.

This study is part of an interdisciplinary research project intended to document the impact of state and federal fisheries access limitation programs (like limited entry and individual fishing quotas or IFQs) on the economy and sociocultural fabric of Alaska Native villages in the Gulf of Alaska. Carothers and Watson (2024) provide a summary of major findings of this study. Watson and Burke (2024) provide more background on the study and document economic, fishery, and community data. This report presents results from a survey of shareholders and descendants of Koniag, Inc. (n=1,320 respondents; ~30% response rate) and Sealaska Corporation (n=3,024 respondents; ~15% response rate).

Executive Summary The purpose of this report is to document economic and demographic changes for communities of the Gulf of Alaska, Southcentral Alaska, and Southeast Alaska over the period of 1950 to 2023. Over this period several major changes were made to the way that State and Federal commercial fisheries were managed in Alaska waters. These changes -particularly the introduction of the Limited Entry program in the mid-1970s and individual fishing quotas in the mid-1990’s - limited access to fisheries. Changes to fisheries access has implications not just for the fisherman directly included or excluded, but also more broadly to their home communities through the economic spillover effects that the fishing industry creates. Watson et al., (2021) shows that the impacts of the commercial fishing industry in Alaska extends beyond the income it provides to vessel captains. Fishing activity also provides for crew member and shore-side processing jobs and spillover effects into upstream and downstream industries. It also creates broader induced economic effects as income and wages are spent on local goods and services. However, as Watson et al., (2021) shows, these effects only tend to materialize in the home communities of fishermen. In other words, economic impacts follow fishermen.

Measuring the appropriate level of teacher compensation for different working conditions requires overcoming a number of empirical challenges, including defining and measuring differences in qualifications, effects of non-wage compensation, financial constraints, and lack of market clearing. We address those challenges in a study of teacher compensation in Alaska’s 462 public schools in 53 districts. Each of our three linked empirical specifications produces a set of different compensation adjustments needed to offset differences in working conditions across schools and communities. However, an overall pattern is clear: if districts wish to attract and retain teachers of similar qualifications across all schools, schools serving mainly racially minoritized and low-income populations will need to pay substantially more than they currently do. Estimated required compensation adjustments are quite large in some cases, illustrating the need to address working conditions and other factors that affect teachers’ choices to accept and stay in jobs at high-need schools.

Restricting access to fisheries and other common property resources through creation of individual transferable rights has been documented to create wealth and promote conservation, but has also reduced employment and increased inequality in fishing communities. Creating group rights instead of individual rights has been suggested as an alternative strategy that could realize the benefits with diminished social cost; however, little independent evaluation of actual implementations of group rights to fisheries has occurred. The Western Alaska Community Development Quota (CDQ) program represents an example of allocation of group fishery rights to six not-for-profit organizations representing 65 small, largely Indigenous coastal communities. Using a unique data set of individual and household survey records spanning more than 25 years, we applied a difference-in-differences approach to measure changes in a variety of social and economic indicators, including Indigenous language use and educational attainment, employment, earnings, income, and poverty status, while controlling for demographic and general economic changes over the years. We found significant differences in outcomes for individuals and households in CDQ-participating communities from those residing in nearby communities ineligible for participation. Differences were especially pronounced for earnings and income. Results suggest that group rights can provide significant social benefits. The relatively small community populations provides insufficient power to determine statistically whether the benefits of the CDQ program have been increasing or diminishing over the years, or whether some communities have benefited more than others.

Considerable interest and effort in identifying significant wildfire risk is drawn from the catastrophic impact of increasingly large and destructive wildfires on people, their health and safety, and the values and developments that support them. Improved methods include updated efforts to represent hazard and exposure across landscapes and within communities. The tools and techniques applied and evaluated here are collectively called Wildfire Exposure Assessment, a process developed and published by Jennifer L. Beverly (University of Alberta) and others. The simplicity and speed of the Exposure Assessment method make it an important prospect for communities planning for the protection of their citizenry and the values that support them. It makes few assumptions about factors difficult to assert and quantify over planning time horizons. Applied here specifically for communities in the Boreal biome, its utility is evaluated for three communities: Anchorage and Fairbanks in Alaska, and Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory. Further, it has been applied to all lands for both Alaska and the Yukon Territory based on vegetation classification from 2014. To this day, all spatial depictions of wildfire hazard begin as vegetation maps. The NASA Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE), among its many environmental assessments, produced a consistent, historical catalog of vegetation and land cover classifications over the life of the LANDSAT period of record, dating to 1984. These provided a consistent and useful set of products for use in establishing the spatial distribution of wildfire hazards and the utility these datasets could provide for the three boreal communities considered.

Currently, more than half of the world’s human population lives in urban areas, which are increasingly affected by climate hazards. Little is known about how multi-hazard environments affect people, especially those living in urban areas in northern latitudes. This study surveyed homeowners in Anchorage and Fairbanks, USA, Alaska’s largest urban centers, to measure individual risk perceptions, mitigation response, and damages related to wildfire, surface ice hazards, and permafrost thaw. Up to one third of residents reported being affected by all three hazards, with surface ice hazards being the most widely distributed, related to an estimated $25 million in annual damages. Behavioral risk response, policy recommendations for rapidly changing urban environments, and the challenges to local governments in mitigation efforts are discussed.