Collaborative climate mitigation and adaptation planning with university, community, and municipal partners: a case study in Anchorage, Alaska

ABSTRACT

Cities around the world are creating formal planning documents proposing local actions to mitigate and prepare for the impacts of climate change. Despite a growing number of examples of such plans and “toolkits” that outline the process for undertaking these planning efforts, many cities are still struggling to know where to start. Furthermore, meta-analyses of existing climate action plans show that many suffer from similar limitations including lack of scientific input, failure to consider strategies across multiple sectors within local government, limited public involvement, narrow focus on mitigation, and lack of detail regarding implementation and monitoring. This paper describes our process for developing the Anchorage Climate Action Plan and our experience fusing a three-way partnership between the municipal government, a local university, and the broader Anchorage, Alaska community. We describe the nuts and bolts of our funding, leadership structure, and technical working sessions and reflect on the key structural, political, and social elements that catalysed plan development, adoption, and implementation. Our experience suggests that public support from municipal leaders, commitment from local experts, a dedicated steering committee, a diverse set of stakeholders, and a good working relationship with the local government officials (e.g. Assembly members or City Council) are critical to creating a successful framework for climate mitigation and adaptation planning in a community. Collaborative planning with a local university that prioritises community-engagement can support the development of a robust planning document that integrates local scientific expertise and is representative of the community it is meant to serve.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• climate adaptation
• climate action planning
• municipal-university collaboration
• community engagement

Acknowledgements

We want to thank the members of the steering committee, working groups, and advisory committee as well as the substantial number of Anchorage residents who contributed to the development of the 2019 Anchorage Climate Action Plan. Thank you specifically to Brian Brettschneider and Shaina Kilcoyne for your feedback on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental material

As we were developing the Anchorage Climate Action Plan, several other Alaskan communities approached us with questions about our process. To help address this need, we developed a toolkit that describes our process in detail and includes resources we referenced while developing our process, the worksheets from the technical sessions, and a description of the different types of community meetings we facilitated. The toolkit and final Anchorage Climate Action plan can be accessed at the Municipality of Anchorage's Sustainability website (www.muni.org/sustainability).

Notes

1 http://www.muni.org/climateactionplan.

2 UAA Difficult Dialogues https://www.uaa.alaska.edu/academics/institutional-effectiveness/departments/center-for-advancing-faculty-excellence/difficult-dialogues/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Alaska Faculty Initiative Fund; the University of Alaska Anchorage Center for Community Engagement and Learning Resilient Cities grant; and the Jack and Martha Roderick Sustainability Fund.