Alaska's Changing Environment 2.0
What's happening in Alaska and why it matters
Alaska’s climate and environment are changing rapidly. Alaskans know this because the changes over the past few decades are evident to our eyes. But finding accurate and up-to-date information about specific changes, even within individual subject areas, has historically been difficult for the non-specialist, much less a broad, understandable overview of the complex and interconnected transformations that are impacting Alaska now.
Supporting the mission to help build healthy and thriving Alaska communities, economies, and ecosystems in a changing climate, I’m thrilled to report that the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy (ACCAP) at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has just released Alaska’s Changing Environment 2.0, which is available online and as a downloadable pdf, here.
Content
Alaska’s Changing Environment 2.0 (ACE2.0) is chock-full of information on a wide variety of climate and ecosystem topics and how changes are impacting Alaskans lives and livelihoods. The Table of Content in the image below gives you an idea of the breadth of the topics covered: from air temperatures to sea ice to salmon and wildlife. ACE 2.0 updates key long-term climate trends and it highlights the changes and impacts that have emerged or accelerated over the past five years. A focus area is on high impact extreme weather and climate events, which have nearly doubled in Alaska in the past five years compared to 2014-19 (for more detailed information on historic extreme events, check out the ACCAP Extreme Events Library). Dozens of experts, academic and Indigenous alike, contributed to and reviewed ACE2.0. We worked hard to make the report as up-to-date as possible: much of the climate information is current through early autumn 2024.
Here’s a page from the report that illustrates the communications style used throughout. This is a page from the plants section: clear topics, simple graphs, photos that illustrate the topic and foregrounding the lived experience of Alaskans.
The Backstory
As you might guess from the name, this is the second edition of Alaska’s Changing Environment. In early 2019, Hajo Eicken, Director of the International Arctic Research Center (IARC) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, asked IARC Chief Scientist John Walsh, Science Communications lead Heather McFarland and myself to lead a project to take observed environmental change information about Alaska and present it in a way that was understandable to anyone interested. The result was Alaska’s Changing Environment. Published in August 2019, it has consistently been one of IARC’s most popular webpages, with tens of thousands of hits. Thousands of hard copies of the report were given out in the ensuing years. It was so successful that it became the flagship of an ongoing entire series of publications.
Within six months of the release of Alaska’s Changing Environment we were getting emails asking when specific graphics would be updated. As you might expect, given the pace of change and the wide impacts, updating the report was a major undertaking and had to be balanced with other priorities. In early 2024 we made the decision that the time had come to make resources available to not just update data but to create a new publication that extended and built on the strengths of the original report. People, information sources and circumstances have all changed since 2019, but we had a successful model to serve as a guide.
ACE2.0 focuses on what’s happened since the original report, using the same communications style. Some of the updates add on five more years of data. In many cases, the information here is newly presented in this format. As a result, ACE2.0 is twice as long as the original. We expect that ACE 2.0 will serve Alaskans for several years as a ready reference for what’s happening in Alaska and why it matters.
The link for ACE 2.0 is https://uaf-accap.org/alaskas-changing-environment/
Also we all owe you and your collaborators a great deal of thanks for this. There are so many things to focus on, but the sea acidity increase is something surprising to me, although it shouldn't be. Salmon size decreasing, ocean temperatures rising, lightning strikes increasingly, plants ripening too soon- what a witches' cauldron we've created, God forgive us.
This is great- seeing the 2.0 edition. The overall picture discussed is not so great, even alarming, if we generalize over the circumpolar region.