Arctic Communities

Communities in Alaska and around the Arctic—especially those where Alaska Natives and other indigenous peoples make up most of the population—face many forces of change, including the effects of climate change, pressures on subsistence resources and on mixed cash-subsistence economies, rising costs of living, and lack of jobs for young people—including in coastal communities, where opportunities in commercial fisheries have diminished. ISER researchers study issues affecting Arctic communities, often with national or international partners. Examples of that work include assessments of the resilience and adaptability of communities in the face of change.

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AURA

Summary

Climate change is increasing the vulnerability of arctic urban communities to natural hazards such as unstable permafrost, wildfire, and rain-in-winter events. The Arctic Urban Risks and Adaptations (AURA) project undertakes a spatially explicit assessment of the three natural hazards as they have evolved simultaneously in the Municipality of Anchorage and the Fairbanks North Star Borough, Alaska, and Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada over the past several decades, and how they might change over the next 40 years.

  • 04 Dec 2025
  • Ongoing

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MicroFews

Summary

Coupling infrastructure improvements to food-energy-water (FEW) system dynamics in small cold region communities

The goal of the MicroFEWs project is to develop a new holistic approach to understanding the linkages between renewable energy use and its downstream impacts upon food, energy, and water (FEW) security in remote Arctic and Subarctic communities. The power grids in such communities, termed islanded microgrids, represent nuclei around which this study frames the local FEW nexus, and the introduction of renewable energy into these systems provide the perturbations necessary to understand system dynamics. This process will be developed through close cooperation with community stakeholders from beginning to end.

  • 29 Oct 2025
  • Archived

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Announcing ADAC-ARCTIC, a New DHS Center of Excellence Led by UAA

ISER is very pleased to be a collaborating partner in this important center at UAA. We will share more about the research initiatives and other activities involving ISER as the details are confirmed, and we look forward to helping advance understandings of security in the Arctic and to supporting the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in their efforts to better respond to challenges in the Arctic domain.

  • 12 Jan 2024

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Alaska Infrastructure Development Symposium

As part of the Alaska Infrastructure Development Symposium, organized by the Alaska Municipal League (AML), ISER had the opportunity to lead a critical discussion on data management. At a time when an unprecedented amount of federal funding is available through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), challenges surrounding data requirements remain a significant barrier for many applicants. 

  • 07 Oct 2023

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Are there global indicators that can help Arctic cities measure and improve sustainability?

ISO 37120 is an international list of standards that measure sustainability in urban cities. It boasts 49 equally-weighted core indicators, along with 59 supporting indicators and 24 profile indicators. Gathering all of this data can give cities insight into their sustainability, but does it work for Anchorage, Reykjavík or Yakutsk as well as it does for Seattle and São Paolo? In a recent study, ISER's Matthew Berman and co-author Robert Orttung analyzed how ISO 37120 could be improved to make it an effective tool for the Arctic.
  • 01 Dec 2020
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