SBIR Phase II: Development of Integrated Climate Adaptation and Resiliency

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The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to improve the ability to build resilient infrastructure and advance the health, welfare, and cultural sustainability of rural Alaska communities in the face of a changing climate. Currently, climate change is a threat multiplier that exacerbates social inequity by disproportionally impacting remote Native Alaskan communities. There are significant gaps in available, actionable data for these communities to improve their livability and climate resilience. Without intervention, the deteriorating conditions in the villages may cause permanent damage to their traditional way of life and, in extreme cases, whole villages could be lost. This project combines geometrics, future climates, and geodesign in a data repository used to identify current and potential hazard susceptibility. Communities can use this data to identify climate risks, develop, evaluate, and compare management actions, and increase the resilience and sustainability of their villages based on how they use their natural resources and their short-, mid-, and long-term goals. The project seeks to help communities to help themselves by providing reliable, science-based, actionable data that incorporates Traditional Knowledge and empowers informed decisions.The research and development activities include: (1) baseline data collection and data gap identification using remote sensing, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), photogrammetry, and in-situ data collection for five test communities, (2) future climate modeling to provide reliable and defensible projected climates, as well as model output that has been processed by bias correction and/or downscaling, and (3) the creation and rigorous training of a machine learning technique to produce hazard susceptibility maps. These maps, which show the spatial likelihood of a hazard occurrence, are crucial for environmental management, urban planning, and minimizing economic losses. This project provides a prediction method that contributes to hazard forecasting that is currently embedded in traditional modeling methods, potentially avoiding maladaptations. Planning and adaptation for Alaska’s environmental changes are necessary to reduce community vulnerability while providing actionable data for community-guided outcomes, increasing climate resilience. The project seeks to provide the nexus between state-of-the-art climate knowledge, environmentally threatened communities, and decision-makers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.