Looking Forward, Looking Back, while Building Resilience Today: Key Elements In Adaptation Planning with Alaska Native Communities

In Alaska Native communities, community adaptation to climate change is happening in a dynamic context of Indigenous worldview, livelihood, and culture, ongoing colonization and active decolonization efforts, and layered complex governance. The climate impacts on the land, water, food security and infrastructure of these communities are profound. To secure agency funding for adaptation projects, communities need to develop technical assessments and adaptation plans. Project structure and holistic framing, which in this project was across local to global scale, the deliberate inclusion of a core community team, relational stories, and use of accessible language in adaptation planning are critical elements of collaboration. These elements are foundations of addressing equity in engaging and working with Indigenous community knowledge and western/climate science. Each of these elements helps to mutually expand capacity in participating communities and climate scientists to meet the technical needs of tribal communities seeking to actively address adaptation. The exchange of Indigenous and western knowledge requires cultivating trust and iterative dialogue, especially when exploring and applying complex information. We created a set of trainings and community meetings to frame this dialogue through the lens of looking forward to future climate projections, looking back at the past experience and knowledge, and exploring what actions are needed today to develop adaptation-relevant information collaboratively. Use-inspired science must strive to include these elements of engagement to be more equitable, balanced, and deliberately reciprocal: Reciprocity in practice, centers our mutual relationships, our individual and collective responsibilities and, lays the foundations supporting next steps in working together.