Climate change and seismic resilience: Key considerations for Alaska’s infrastructure and built environment

improvement including: (1) extending the code requirements to Anchorage surrounds; (2) requiring limited adoption of the residential building code for structures located in high-seis- mic zones elsewhere; and (3) requiring residential building inspectors be hired by the property owner and not the constructor/builder, to improve transparency and reduce conflicts of interest. Other project participants raised related countervailing points, suggesting a cascade of questions and tradeoffs meriting further research exploration from a coupled human-environ- ment systems perspective on adaptive capacity as a longer-term endeavor. Most regulatory change involves a reallocation of cost and benefits between public and private interests. These changes often result in differential impacts among heterogeneous social groups and entities. Significantly, social science and practitioner analyses of seismic and other environmental haz- ards find that reliance on centralized government and prevailing command-and-control mod- els of resource mobilization can correlate negatively with resilience and that less tangible, social factors and capacity building can be significant [73–75]. One workshop speaker and advocate for Native communities urged consideration of alternative construction methods, avoiding technologies that are standard outside Alaska but may fail and cannot be easily repaired by local people with readily available materials. She pointed to reliance on bathroom plumbing as particularly problematic, whereas composting toilets or outhouses can be more

reliable in remote, seismically active areas. Social science studies of housing, construction, and regulatory oversight note that these activities are longitudinal processes that take place in complex and heterogeneous social con- texts [73, 74, 76, 77]. In other words, they involve a wide array of social groups with diverse interests and knowledge bases, interacting in ways that vary over time and space. For example, building codes are often influenced by private sector interest groups with sufficient lobbying resources, are implemented per variable priorities of enforcement officers, and mainly affect new construction and renovations rather than existing construction [78]. In some housing markets, building codes can lower housing costs and associated transaction costs and/or raise property values through standardization and safety protections [79, 80]. In other markets, stringent or aspirational codes can shift the low-income housing market toward publicly-pro- vided rental housing built for economies of scale, and away from local tradespeople who might build wealth in their neighborhoods through incremental, small-scale development, which tends to be more adaptive to social-environmental change [75, 79, 80]. Research supports the feelings of many independent builders and owner-builders that codes often advantage larger businesses with weaker social ties to tenants and business models focused on short-term profits rather than longer-term neighborhood development and quality of life [80].

Building code enforcement has differential effects on owner-occupied and rental properties and may reduce the availability of low-income housing in some markets [80, 81]. Codes can discourage the repurposing of older buildings and recycling of materials, stifle competition, and slow or speed certain kinds of innovation [79]. Some note that mandatory codes encour- age building to the minimum standard, whereas training in best practices and voluntary or incentivized codes (such as streamlined permitting and inspections) can help establish self- replicating ethical norms while allowing for innovation [79]. Like any regulatory process, building codes can become mechanisms for discrimination or corruption [81]. Alaska is not immune from these phenomena as a resource-extractive frontier with relatively attenuated social networks, cultural tensions between Indigenous and settler populations, and limited news media coverage. Additionally, many communities are staunchly opposed to any increase in government regulatory oversight. Helpfully, process models for the development of resilient housing and building codes that increase local capacity and are appropriate to local social and material contexts can be found PLOS ONE Climate change and seismic resilience: Key considerations for Alaska’s infrastructure and built environment PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0292320 October 18, 2023 11 / 17