Anchorage environmentalists call on state legislature to create ‘Climate Resiliance Fund’ following Halong
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) — Western Alaska has become no stranger to severe weather between former Typhoons Merbok and Halong; the region has been devastated by the storms in 2022 and 2025, respectively.
Now, environmentalist Rick Steiner is calling on the Alaska Legislature to start thinking about how to best handle climate change in the Last Frontier.
“The climate crisis that we’re in for the rest of this century — nobody can deny it any longer, it’s here, it’s real,” Steiner said. “The crisis is going to get worse over this century.”
Stiener, a long-time activist, has been calling on the Alaska Legislature to create a “Climate Resilience Fund,” a system to help harden the outlying communities from future harm by investing in infrastructure in the region.
“There are things we can do to harden these villages,” Steiner began.
“Anchoring the houses to their foundations so they don’t float away in storms, better protection from storm inundation in villages, protecting water systems, the sewer systems, the electrical power generators.”
Given the timing of the call to action, there appears to be an appetite for it. Ky Holland — a representative for Alaska’s 9th District, which covers a chunk of South Anchorage, Girdwood, and Whittier — explained his reasoning for seeing the benefits of the legislation Steiner is calling for.
”The return on investment of climate adaptation, you know, has got by some estimates a 10 or 20 times return on investment, it’s huge,“ Holland said. ”The cost of doing nothing and paying for fixing things every time they get damaged by another storm will be an unfathomable amount of money and drain on our national economic and our state economy.”
The problem the legislation faces is the potential costs; Holland expects the Legislature to reconvene in a “dire fiscal challenge,” thanks in part to the challenges the state faced earlier in the year.
“For example, the wildfire suppression that got taken out of the budget, we’re still going to have to pay those costs. So, we’re going to start off finding ourselves with a need for some sort of supplemental appropriation just to take care of the bills for this year,” Holland said. “And then we’re going to find ourselves, you know, struggling with the same challenges we had in terms of the operating budget and capital budget for next year.”
Despite the financial uphill battle the legislation faces, Holland sees the potential bill to be an economic engine for Western Alaska.
“I want to see the investments in this fund used to, in part, help create long-term regional economic development capacity to invest in the hardening, if that’s needed, for seawalls and riverbanks or building houses, either for recovery or for moving to new locations, creating the local capability for utility growth,” Holland said.
According to Steiner, this type of legislation has been successfully signed into law in other states, with a notable example being Hawaii.
“They established a nominal tax on tourism,” Steiner explained. “Which will earn about $100 million a year, for which the state of Hawaii will deal with these climate change impacts and better preparation, prevention, mitigation, adaptation, and response.”
The proposed legislation will have to wait until the next legislative session, but with so many climate issues on the horizon, Steiner says the time to act is now.
“We need to do better,” Steiner concluded.
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