If you’ve lived in Anchorage for a while, and think winter used to feel different, you’re not crazy, said Anchorage-based climate researcher Brian Brettschneider.
“Anchorage is warmer than it used to be, and we actually get more snow in the core winter months — December, January, February,” Brettschneider said. “But then less snow in the shoulder months — October, November, March and April — and we get more rain in those months.”
Seven years ago, Brettschneider was part of a team of climate investigators helping to develop the city’s climate action plan under former Mayor Ethan Berkowitz. He said changing winter patterns have created what he calls the “worst of both worlds” for city services.
“We get more demand on services and infrastructure due to greater snowfall in the core winter for now,” he said, “but then we have different demands than we historically have had in the shoulder season, with more rain, more freezing rain, more freeze-thaw cycles.”
Anchorage’s climate action plan didn’t get a lot of attention under former Mayor Dave Bronson. While some departments still worked on it, the administration did not issue the annual progress reports the city had committed to doing, and links to the plan disappeared from the city’s website.
Now, under Mayor Suzanne LaFrance, the plan is being rebranded — and expanded — into a broader energy and resilience planning effort.
“Climate change fits into the discussion, I think, in almost every layer of how our municipal departments respond to the needs of citizens,” said Richelle Johnson, energy and sustainability manager for the city’s Solid Waste Services department.
Like other departments, Johnson said addressing climate change in solid waste is a two-pronged effort. One is being energy-efficient, and reducing the department’s carbon footprint. The other is adapting to changes already occurring due to a warming climate.
“You can look at it in terms of the infrastructure that we're developing and maintaining as a city too, that needs to be much more resilient and be designed and sort of built out and maintained with different conditions than it has been in the past,” Johnson said.
For instance, more freezing rain could mean icier roads and a greater need for sanding. While heavier snow months could require more coordination with state officials to clear roads for Anchorage school buses.
And planning for climate change goes beyond winter.
Nolan Klouda, a policy advisor for LaFrance, said another growing concern is wildfire mitigation as Anchorage summers become drier and warmer. In the past the city focused on identifying evacuation routes, but that’s changed a bit in recent years.
“If anyone who's been up to the Stuckagain Heights Road, there was a big fuel clearing effort around the road that also provides egress, you know, so emergency people can get out of that to clear the trees, so that there's a fire break there, to protect that access and egress,” Klouda said.
Even weather events outside of Anchorage could have an impact on the city's infrastructure needs, Klouda said.
“Are there more winter storms, even in other parts of the state, like we saw with Western Alaska, that lead to people being evacuated to Anchorage,” he said. “How do we deal with that?”
As quickly as Anchorage is warming, rural Alaska is heating up at an even faster rate. Brettschneider, the climate researcher, said that will likely lead to more severe events like the Western Alaska storms in October that displaced hundreds.
“There's a lot of research that suggests that climate extremes are increasing, because of the changes in the temperature of the ocean, the changes in the temperature of the atmosphere, the distribution of sea ice that we do expect there to be a greater frequency of these events in the aggregate,” Brettschneider said.
Overall, Klouda said revamping the climate action plan is about acknowledging that some weather patterns have become less predictable, and the city has to be prepared.
“You have to have the capacity to respond to events that you may not be able to predict,” Klouda said. “You may not know when they're going to happen, but you have to be ready for them.”
Klouda said in addition to addressing climate change, another big focus of the rebranded energy and resilience planning effort is looking into the city’s energy needs, as the region faces a natural gas shortage.
