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Drought and Extreme Events: Building collaborations to enhance data, decision making, and adaptation planning in Southeast Alaska

Drought and Extreme Events

Southeast Alaska is a temperate rainforest that has been experiencing extreme weather events recently. Dry conditions and extreme drought have had economic impacts and created warming low oxygen environments for salmon which are important for subsistence and commercial economies. In May 2019 a drought workshop for Southeast Alaska was held to refine drought categories for the region, increase awareness of the National Drought Monitor and drought-impacts reporting, and begin to highlight available information and resources to assist with adapting to drought. However, since 2019 drought conditions have ceased and Southeast Alaska has experienced extreme wind, rain, and snow events that have had profound societal impacts.

Workshop Format

This workshop will continue what was learned from the May 2019 workshop on drought, but also address extreme events through efforts by agencies, academic researchers, tribes, and others to assess the potential impacts of both drought and extreme events on both the natural and built environments. This includes new monitoring efforts by scientists in Southeast Alaska.

The goal of this workshop is to build on this momentum and assist with the development of community-driven adaptation strategies to serve the specific needs, challenges, and opportunities of remote, temperate rainforest communities. A secondary objective will review recent research projects, and a third will assess recent decision support tools for communities, land managers, and others for use in adaptation planning.

Outcomes

Participants will coproduce drought adaptation strategies to meet the specific and vast needs of Southeast Alaska. By bringing together a wide variety of stakeholders in Southeast Alaska to develop adaptation strategies, we will be able to harness the diversity of thought, knowledge, and experience to develop strategies that will have local applicability and support; and thus, will be more likely to succeed across the broader region.

This will be a hybrid event, held in person in Juneau, Alaska as well as online on 30-31 March.

Event Date Start-End

March 30, 2022 / 12:00 PM - March 31, 2022 / 06:00 PM