Hi,

I am an environmental and natural resource economist who studies the effects of projected climate change on our state’s built environment. The built environment in my current project includes bridges, roads, water/sewer, and many different types of buildings.

Prior to arriving in Alaska, I was an economist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (Boulder, CO USA) where I built sophisticated models to study the effects of weather variability on the U.S. economy.

As a researcher who works in the arctic where these changes seem to be the most pronounced, I am happy to write in to climate commons to report on my observations.

In general, many people in Alaska are becoming concerned about climate change for many reasons. From my perspective, the media is doing its part to both confuse and educate people (depending on who you ask and where they get their information). That being said, I think there are some serious things occurring in our region that make people wonder what is really happening and what they can do to help. For example, there are reports of fisherman catching tropical fish in the Bering Sea and hummingbirds showing up in the dead of winter. The most recent IPCC temperature projections for places within our state show enormous increases in temperature out over the next two or three decades. This is scary stuff for anyone to grasp.

That said, my job is to put dollar values on the effects of climate change. Policymakers think in terms of dollars, so we express these changes in monetary terms. Right now, we are reporting on projected damages to public infrastructure to stress the urgency of this matter. Unfortunately, though, it is nearly impossible to put economic value on cultural loss or ecosystem collapse. In the end, we hope that websites like this one and other providers of information will get the story of Alaska out to a wider audience.

More later,

-- PeterLarsen