Erosion

Point feature class showing threat assessment rankings for flood, erosion, and permafrost. In 2019, the Denali Commission Statewide Threat Assessment found that 144 Alaska Native communities (43 percent of all communities in the state of Alaska) are likely to face some degree of infrastructure damage from erosion, flooding, and/or permafrost thaw. Communities are grouped into three categories groups 1-3, with group 1 most at-risk, group 2 at moderate risk, and group 3 at lower risk . The study was carried out by three entities working closely with the Denali Commission. The US Army Corps of Engineers Alaska District (USACE) was responsible for evaluating threats from flooding and erosion. The new work carried out by USACE focused primarily upon flooding, because erosion was considered extensively in the Baseline Erosion Assessment (USACE 2009) for 134 communities that were also evaluated for this study. The University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Institute of Northern Engineering and the USACE Engineer Research and Development Center Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) were responsible for evaluating the risk from thawing permafrost, as well as integrating the combined threats from erosion, flooding, and thawing permafrost into an overall score.