Climate Adaptation
Developing a frontline adaptation program that sustains biodiversity in a rapidly changing climate.
Alaska's climate is warming at three to four times the rate of the Lower 48. Glaciers are receding, sea ice is disappearing, sea levels are rising, permafrost is thawing, wildfire is becoming more extreme, and marine and nonglacial waters are warming.
Wildlife and plants are responding, moving northward in latitude and upward in elevation. White-tailed deer and mule deer, once constrained to Canada, now have a harvest season in Alaska. Rufous and Anna's hummingbirds, two bird species that historically did not occur in Alaska, now winter on the Kenai Peninsula. Moose are increasing in abundance and distribution on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, a response to expanding shrubs and lightning-caused wildfire. Beaver and cottonwood have begun colonizing the North Slope, displacing arctic foxes and polar bears that are quickly losing their historic ranges in Alaska.
These are success stories - the Alaskan species capable of adapting on their own to rapidly changing conditions.
Unfortunately, most species cannot respond as quickly, leaving them to flounder in habitats increasingly out of sync with their needs, a process that will ultimately lead to extinctions, novel assemblages, and degraded ecosystems.
AWA not only supports traditional land conservation as a means to conserve our biodiversity, we also promote novel management approaches that facilitate adaptation to rapid ecological transformations. Read on to learn more about our Resist-Accept-Direct approach, as well as our strategies.
Our Current Climate Programs
In partnership with the Native Village of Paimiut and the Intertribal Environmental Consortium, AWA is helping build a future for the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta’s most vulnerable species and communities
We’ve partnered with the Kachemak Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, the University of Alaska Center for Conservation Science, and the University of South Florida to demonstrate that beavers and their dams can combat climate change on the Kenai Peninsula.
Our Recent Climate Adaptation Work
Our Approach and Strategies
Alaska Wildlife Alliance has contributed to the development of the Resist, Accept, Direct (RAD) framework, which lays out three choices for communities and agencies to guide their climate adaptation planning. Along with the RAD framework, our strategies
Inform Alaskan public policy to recognize climate change and ensure that it is considered in all wildlife and habitat decisions
Create and coordinate alliance-based working groups to spearhead this strategy, “cross pollinate” ideas, and build public support and consensus;
Advocate for climate change models to be considered in all state wildlife management policies, plans, and working groups. See our 2022 Climate Workshop;
Educate decision makers on climate change impacts to wildlife, ecosystem health, biodiversity, and environmental justice.
Collaboratively develop innovative climate adaptation plans across Alaska that are founded in ecosystem management
Promote decision frameworks that demand ecosystem and landscape-scaled context in the development of community adaptation plans;
Promote field experiments to validate modeled ecological trajectories before they happen;
Build alliances to facilitate the development of pilot studies that demonstrate climate change adaptation approaches. Pilot studies showcase novel ways of solving a management problem, demonstrating ecological and economic feasibility before scaling up.
