Coastal Resilience and Adaptation:Working Together to go from Information to Action on Alaska's Coasts

The phrases "coastal resilience" and "climate adaptation" appear everywhere now—but how do they meet the needs of communities and natural resource managers on Alaska's coast? A regional consortium of The Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association, four of Alaska's Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs), NOAA, University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Alaska Climate Science Center joined numerous local partners including several Tribes and Alaska Native Organizations to host workshops in five regions to find out.The project brought together audiences from Tribal and local government, State and Federal agencies, scientists and local experts to share the state of existing knowledge on current and anticipated environmental changes and impacts and discuss potential response actions. Targeting information and tools needed for decision making and resource management, the hundreds of workshop participants identified gaps in available data, information and knowledge that needs to be filled to help communities and managers better respond to climate change. Each of the workshops built upon the other and connected stakeholders and increase resiliency by

bringing local decision makers together with the researchers who can fill their needs, consolidating and leveraging research being done in the region by many different parties (western and traditional) and ensuring those results get to those who need them, and creating an adaptive, collaborative process of identifying needs, conducting work, gathering the latest science from local to national sources, presenting results for evaluation and feedback, and using that information to drive future research and management investments. The resulting "toolbox" will help management agencies and others to better understand the dynamic changes Alaska is experiencing, their impacts on communities and habitats, as well as tools and information that can help managers and community leaders work better together to adapt to climate change.