Discussion on Multi-Agency Field Review Focused on Landslides, Asset Management and Climate Change in Alaska

Climate change is occurring, and owners/agencies are seeing the impact of warming temperatures and extreme weather on landslides and other geohazards across the globe. Asset management is becoming more important and more challenging with the rapidly changing environment. State and Federal agencies need to collaborate and partner on new ways to address these challenges; design of one-size-fits-all engineering solutions won’t work effectively anymore. Alaska is an obvious nexus of these issues as the state is experiencing observable and measurable impacts from climate change in real time. Landslides and climate (as well as resilience) are significant administration priorities, and there is benefit in understanding how other agencies are approaching today’s challenges. These topics were explored at a peer exchange meeting in Alaska in 2023. Key takeaway from that exchange include: the need to understand the inventory of hazards; the context of each agency, which provides key differences in strategy, policies, and priorities; the constraints that will drive risk reduction versus risk mitigation; the need to evaluate the entire system and not look at each individual hazard; and the criticality of relationships across organizational boundaries – no one agency can solve these challenges on their own. Strategies used by various agencies in Alaska can inform practices in other regional settings with their own distinct climate and extreme event challenges and project characteristics.