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Wildfire Exposure and Risk Assessment for Dillingham, Aleknagik, and Igiugig, AlaskaThe purpose of this report is to assess present-day (2024) and future (2054) wildfire hazard, exposure, and vulnerability within the Bristol Bay region. We also provide a wildfire risk assessment for Dillingham, Igiugig, and Aleknagik. These three communities were included explicitly because they are updating their Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPP) and/or provided support for this project.
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Demand for Natural Gas in Southcentral AlaskaHouseholds and businesses in Southcentral Alaska have relied on Cook Inlet natural gas as their primary energy source for decades, but as utilities face rising costs to secure that gas they are evaluating a portfolio of alternatives, including LNG imports, potential North Slope supplies, alternative fuels for electricity generation, and demand-side management, weighing each along dimensions of cost, timing, quantity, reliability, and long-term economic sustainability. Although technically recoverable gas remains in the Cook Inlet, it will likely be available only at increasingly higher prices, and the gap between lower-cost local supply and regional demand is expected to widen over time; currently identified alternative energy projects (particularly if limited to a narrower set of wind, solar, and geothermal developments) are insufficient on their own to close that deficit. Electrification of residential and commercial heating could reduce direct gas use but would raise electricity demand, potentially increasing gas consumption at gas-fired generators unless additional non-gas generation is developed, meaning the net gas savings are uncertain even though households and businesses may independently adopt such investments. Given these constraints, it is difficult to construct near-term scenarios that avoid LNG imports, while over the medium to long term a broader set of options, including expanded renewables and possible North Slope gas delivery, could partly or fully reduce reliance on imported LNG.
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Supply of Natural Gas in Southcentral AlaskaCook Inlet has been the primary source of natural gas for Southcentral Alaska for more than half a century, but while substantial gas remains in the subsurface, the portion that is physically, technically, economically, and socially available at prevailing prices is considerably smaller. This report evaluates regional availability using a four-dimensional resource framework, reconciles competing estimates of remaining reserves and resources, and considers implications for future supply security, with particular emphasis on economic availability and the prices required to make extraction profitable. Estimates from the Alaska Department of Natural Resources suggest that developing reserves in the near to medium term will require substantially higher prices than those seen today. Using historical production costs, this report constructs an illustrative cumulative availability curve showing that the basin’s lowest-cost gas has already been developed and that each additional unit of production will be progressively more expensive. As a result, the region is entering a transitional period in which imports (either piped gas from the North Slope or liquefied natural gas) may soon be more cost-competitive than new local development, even though large volumes of prospective gas remain and uncertainty about their recoverability and cost poses significant planning and investment risk.
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Minerals, Critical Minerals, and Strategic Minerals in Alaska: Challenges and OpportunitiesThis report examines the challenges and opportunities involved in increasing Alaska’s role in the U.S. critical minerals industry. It describes how critical minerals are defined, and which of those have been mined today, have been mined in the past or are likely to be mined in the near future. It describes how market conditions and geology affect Alaska’s opportunities to increase critical mineral production. It also describes how Alaska’s benefits from critical mineral production are the same as those from any mineral production: jobs, income, and taxes. Finally, the report makes recommendations for expanding critical mineral production.
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Advancing Wildfire Preparedness and Planning in Anchorage: Wildfire Exposure and Egress StudyAdvancing 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.
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Report for AK PANOCESU Collaborative Effort to Develop a Statewide Wildfire Exposure Map (L22AC00566)To create a 2023 wildfire exposure map by updating the 2014 NASA ABoVE land cover data with recent wildfire activity at the statewide scale and make this map available online to the wildfire community for decision making. Also, to develop a crosswalk between the ABoVE landcover and LANDFIRE EVT to generate a statewide map that has extended coverage. Then test the performance of each wildfire exposure layer. An ABOVE land cover update is still expected by the end of the year that will be based on new Landsat remote sensed imagery and the coverage will be expanded in Alaska.
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Recruitment, Retention, and Retirement Plan Structure: Evidence from TeachersIn 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.
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Capitalization of Bundled Amenities and Hazards in Home Prices: The Case of Wildfire ExposureWildfires represent a growing threat to property and human life due to climate change and development into higher exposure areas. These risks are particularly salient in the Arctic and subarctic where changes are occurring quickly. This paper uses a hedonic model of home sale prices in Alaska to estimate individuals’ willingness to pay to avoid wildfire exposure. A hedonic housing price analysis shows that the homes most exposed to wildfire actually sell at a premium compared to those homes that are least exposed. However, this premium disappears once proximity to public firefighting infrastructure is accounted for, suggesting that the premium reflects public mitigation and moral hazard. These findings highlight the influence of mitigation efforts and moral hazard in buyers' willingness to pay. Homeowners currently have an economic incentive to locate in high risk areas; more sophisticated insurance risk models and better aligning local taxes with risk may be potential policy interventions.
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The effects of winter street treatment on Chester Creek Water Quality During Snow Melt EventsWater 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.
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Alaska aviation weather infrastructure: outage patterns and strategic prioritizationAlaska 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. We map these outages over space and time and link them to the key hub-and-spoke aviation supply chain networks in the state (e.g. USPS Bypass Mail). By linking infrastructure performance to the populations of communities served, we underscore the protracted impact of AWOS and ASOS 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.
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Alaska aviation weather infrastructure: outage patterns and strategic prioritizationAlaska 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.
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FAA EAGLE Avgas Transition: Considerations for Impacts on Alaskan Supply ChainsFederal bodies have called for a directed transition away from 100 octane low lead aviation gas (100LL avgas) due to public health concerns. Leaded avgas currently powers piston engine aircraft in general aviation and air taxi fleets, serving both recreational and commercial purposes. In considering the unleaded avgas transition, we must acknowledge that public policy frequently generates unintended consequences that reduce anticipated net benefits for subgroups of the population. Particular attention should be placed on regions which are heavily reliant on piston aircraft for core commercial services to remote environments, and where infrastructure adjustments are highly complex and costly. Alaska is one such key context. This brief outlines considerations for potential core supply chain impacts in this remote, aviation-dependent environment and which communities are particularly exposed. While Alaska is 48th in total population, the state is 1st in total volume of intra-state air cargo delivery. Over 80% of the state's communities lie off the road system, and piston engine aircraft are an important component of that commercial fleet. Leveraging granularity in the Bureau of Transport Statistics (BTS) T-100 database, we find that over 50% of carriers reporting intra-Alaska flights had at least one piston engine aircraft in their fleet. In 2023, T-100 data recorded 130,850 commercial piston aircraft flights transporting 201,729 passengers and 30.6M lbs of cargo between Alaskan communities. For non-hub ‘bush’ communities, almost 50% of all commercial flights, 30% of passengers, and 20% of recorded cargo were delivered by piston aircraft. We map community reliance across the state, with particular importance found for off-road destinations in the Southeast, Southwest, and Kodiak. A complete tabular breakdown of piston-engine market shares is generated for all Alaskan destination communities. We conclude by providing key economic questions for Alaska to address ahead of a fuel transition. Assuring the technical performance of unleaded fuel alternatives in Alaskan environments is foundational. Then, to most efficiently utilize the preparation window, policymakers and sector leadership should understand the impact of increased fuel expenses on overall linehaul cost per ton-mile, the share of cost increases borne by service communities, impacts on route viability, and the potentially complex process of staging any necessary support infrastructure such as fuel storage to off-road communities in Alaska's narrow barge season.
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Gulf of Alaska Fisheries Limitation Study: A Survey of Koniag and Sealaska Shareholders and DescendantsThis 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).
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Alaska Health Care Spending ReportThis research brief reports on healthcare spending in Alaska since 1991 and compares health care costs and expenditures in Alaska to national averages.
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Gulf of Alaska Limitations ReportExecutive 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.
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Effects on Households of a Proposed Anchorage Municipal Sales TaxExecutive Summary A coalition of Anchorage business leaders has proposed a sales tax for the Municipality of Anchorage. The tax would be levied at 3% of taxable expenditures. The proposal would allocate 2/3 of the revenues from the tax (2% of taxable expenditures) allocated to property tax relief, and the remaining one third (one percent of taxable expenditures) set aside to fund a capital improvements program. The tax would be temporary, set to expire after about 8 years. A study led by Nolan Klouda at the University of Alaska Anchorage Center for Economic Development (CED) estimated that the proposed sales tax would generate $180 million annually, with 16% of the total paid by non-Anchorage residents. A subsequent update sponsored by Project Anchorage initiative proponents also estimated that the tax would collect $180 million in total but projected 21% would be contributed by non-residents. The current study revisited the assumptions and data used by the previous reports, and after making minor accounting adjustments, confirmed the total revenue estimate of about $180 million, but with 20.5% ($37 million) derived from non-residents. It took a closer look at the $143 million estimated to be collected from residents and the property tax offsets these households might expect, focusing on the distribution of impacts across Anchorage households with different incomes.
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Negotiated Success: Contractual Benefits that Enhance Recruitment and RetentionThis report summarizes monetary and non-monetary items used in Collectively Bargained Agreements (CBAs) to enhance retention and recruitment of educators in and outside of Alaska. This report is one of a series commissioned by the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development to support a stakeholder-informed action plan to address the state’s recurring critical challenges in recruiting and retaining teachers. To approach this task, we narrowed our focus to a review of provisions contained within CBAs in Alaska and a sample of districts in the nation, reviewed relevant literature, and collected stakeholder feedback to further inform the report content and organization. We restrict our analysis to the information contained in CBAs, which are negotiated at the district level, with the noted limitation that CBAs are not exhaustive of all educator benefits (e.g., retirement is an important benefit that is managed at the statewide level). The report details benefits in five broad categories and 15 subcategories, which are bookmarked in this abstract for easy access: coming and staying (signing bonus, longevity/retention bonus); benefits – health and wellbeing (healthcare, sick leave, other leave); benefits – moving and living (travel and relocation, housing and utilities, childcare); knowledge and growth (transferable experience, education and certification, professional development); and work life (contract length and workday, extra duties, hard-to-staff areas, performance pay). Overall, we find that benefits and compensation vary significantly across districts in Alaska, and even more substantially across districts in the national sample, reflecting the diversity in the sample in terms of state, region, size, and location.
