Enlarge / Thawing permafrost along the Sagavanirktok River in Alaska. (credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center/CIRES)

The effects of climate change are not distributed evenly—some areas have a lot more to lose. The Arctic in particular has been seeing temperatures rise roughly twice as fast as the global average. Alaskan glaciers have lost ice at a rate of roughly 42 cubic kilometers per year, Arctic sea ice has continued to decline, Alaska’s shorelines may be eroding at an accelerating rate, its permafrost is melting, and it’s suffering from forest fires at a rate greater than that of the past 10,000 years.

All of this sounds bad, but exactly how dire is it for the people of Alaska? No one wants to witness disaster, but we can determine how much damage can be negated by taking action to prepare and how much could be prevented if we manage to curtail our output of greenhouse gases. Such knowledge could help policymakers prepare for Alaska’s future.

A new study tries to address these questions by estimating the amount of property damage the state will face over the next century. Taking many factors into account—flooding, precipitation, permafrost thawing, and more—the researchers behind the report quantified the damages to infrastructure, and hence the economy, that would occur under both optimistic and pessimistic climate scenarios.