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.

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.