Sorted by date Results 51 - 75 of 117
Alaska fish-harvesting employment declined in 2022, a continuing yearslong slide caused by a variety of factors, according to an analysis by the state Department of Labor. Employment for people harvesting seafood dropped by about 25% from 2015 to 2022, according to the analysis, published in the November issue of Alaska Economic Trends, the department’s monthly research magazine. The industry lost ground compared to other sectors of the Alaska economy, the analysis found. Seafood harvesting accounted for 7.3% of Alaska jobs in July of 2021, b...
Chum salmon are now reproducing farther north in some North Slope rivers, researchers have confirmed. A University of Alaska Fairbanks team this fall found about 100 chum salmon that were spawning or had just spawned in the Anaktuvuk and Itkillik rivers. The rivers are tributaries of the Colville River, which flows into the Arctic Ocean. The discovery of salmon that far north was not a surprise since all five species of Alaska salmon have been spotted in the Arctic, said Peter Westley, an associate professor at UAF’s College of Fisheries and O...
Former President Jimmy Carter was honored Nov. 1 by the Alaska Wilderness League for his conservation work in the state. The Mardie Murie Lifetime Achievement Award recognized Carter’s role in creating and passing the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. “Alaska is a special place for many Americans, and President Carter was ahead of his time in understanding how protecting wild Alaska would outlive his White House tenure,” Kristen Miller, the organization’s executive director, said in a statement. “We honor and celebrate...
Alaska’s industrial development agency has sued the Biden administration in an attempt to revive its Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil and gas leases. The lawsuit filed Oct. 18 by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority alleges that the Department of the Interior violated federal laws and its own regulations when it canceled the leases last month. Interior’s actions were politically motivated and illegally deprived AIDEA and the state of the economic benefits that would come from drilling in the refuge’s coastal plain, an area...
A year after state officials imposed unprecedented shutdowns on crab fishing in the Bering Sea, the snow crab population is in even worse shape than it was last year, when the Alaska Department of Fish and Game canceled the 2022-23 harvest. Survey results were presented Oct. 4 in Anchorage to the advisory panel of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which is charged by the federal government with managing fisheries in the region. The presentation was by Mike Litzow, a National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries biologist...
Alaskans have high rates of chronic health conditions that can lead to death, and they are failing to follow lifestyles that would keep those chronic conditions at bay, according to a newly released state report. Two-thirds of Alaska adults are overweight or obese, nearly a third have high blood pressure and 27% have high cholesterol, according to the state Department of Health’s annual Alaska Chronic Disease Facts report. COVID-19 became the third-leading cause of death for Alaskans in 2021, after cancer and heart disease, and the various c...
Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, which was in place for victories last year by the state’s first Democratic U.S. House member in half a century and the reelection of one of the last remaining moderate Republican U.S. senators, has become a test case for a nation struggling with political polarization. To fans, Alaska’s system shows how voters can reduce extremism and increase civility in government. To detractors, it is an overly complex system that fails to reflect true voter preferences and harms loyal party candidates, especially conser...
Alaska has gotten more money per capita from the federal infrastructure law passed in 2021 than any other state, according to participants at a news conference where the latest injection of funds for the state was announced. Alaska’s member of the U.S. House, Rep. Mary Peltola, and officials from the Biden administration used the event at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage to announce awards totaling $100 million for broadband service in three rural areas. That brings Alaska broadband funding from the Infrastructure Investment a...
After a period when COVID-19 restrictions halted the spread of other respiratory diseases, Alaska had a big increase in influenza cases last fall and winter, state data shows. The overall influenza case load during the 2022-23 season was much higher than in prior years, reports a new bulletin issued by the epidemiology section of the Alaska Division of Public Health. Most notably, cases spiked much earlier in the season, in November and December, before dropping. There were five influenza deaths over the season, all among adults, according to...
The Biden administration on Sept. 6 announced it is canceling the last remaining oil and gas leases in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Those seven leases, all held by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority and sold in a controversial auction held in the final days of former President Donald Trump’s administration, have been in limbo ever since President Joe Biden was sworn into office. On his first day, Biden issued an order requiring a hold on Arctic refuge development to allow for further scrutiny o...
Environmental groups have asked a federal appeals court to overturn the Biden administration’s approval of exports from the proposed $44 billion project to sell North Slope natural gas. The Sierra Club and Center for Biological Diversity filed a petition with the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia on Friday, Aug. 11, seeking to reverse the Department of Energy approval granted in April to the state-led project that would send North Slope gas to Asian markets. The environmental groups argue that the massive project would unleash t...
Alaska Natives in certain rural areas of the state have the nation’s highest death rates from suicide and domestic violence and some of the highest rates of accidental deaths, while Asians and Latinos in the state have some of the nation’s lowest rates for deaths from a wide variety of conditions like heart disease and respiratory disorders, according to a new study. The study, published Thursday, Aug. 3, in The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest medical journals, is a sweeping review of health disparities across the nation, as shown in vario...
The math that more people are leaving Alaska than moving to the state, along with the aging of the adult population that remains, has put Alaska’s largest city and the state at risk of squandering economic opportunities, according to a three-year outlook released Aug. 2 by the nonprofit Anchorage Economic Development Corp. “Anchorage and Alaska are witnessing a weird combination of big economic opportunities that are mostly a sure thing, combined with economic threats that could lead to decades of stagnation and decline,” Bill Popp, the organ...
Elders and adults with disabilities will have more opportunities to get care at home or in a home-like setting under a bill that became state law when Gov. Mike Dunleavy signed it on July 29. The measure, Senate Bill 57, serves two broad categories of Alaskans who might otherwise have to move into assisted-care facilities: disabled adults, including youth who have aged out of the foster system, and elders. For disabled adults, the bill authorizes a system of adult host homes serving one or two people, a category into which foster parents’ h...
Tracking changes in permafrost can take years and sometimes decades, lags that cannot keep up with the transformations in the rapidly warming Arctic. Now scientists will be developing new technology to track those changes in real time, thanks to a project funded by Google. The company has awarded a $5 million grant to the Massachusetts-based Woodwell Climate Research Center to create a system combining satellite data with artificial intelligence to spot the changes as they occur. The project is led by Anna Liljedahl, an Alaska-based Woodwell...
Tracking changes in permafrost can take years and sometimes decades, lags that cannot keep up with the transformations in the rapidly warming Arctic. Now scientists will be developing new technology to track those changes in real time, thanks to a project funded by Google. The company has awarded a $5 million grant to the Massachusetts-based Woodwell Climate Research Center to create a system combining satellite data with artificial intelligence to spot the changes as they occur. The project is led by Anna Liljedahl, an Alaska-based Woodwell...
Thousands of aboveground tanks that store diesel fuel and other petroleum products would no longer be regulated by the state, under a proposal from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. The proposal is to repeal regulation of what are known as Class 2 facilities, which are scattered throughout the state and store between 1,000 and 420,000 gallons of non-crude oil products such as diesel, heating oil and gasoline. If the state regulation is repealed, those Class 2 facilities will no longer be required to register their storage...
More than 2,000 ticks collected over a decade in Alaska revealed a pattern: New tick species are being introduced to the state, often through dogs traveling from the south. They're joining the handful of tick species endemic to the state, which are usually found on small mammals like rabbits. The results are detailed in a new bulletin released by the Alaska Division of Public Health's Epidemiology Section. While several non-native tick species that can spread disease have been imported to...
A federal grant of nearly $3 million over five years will enable Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage to vastly expand its nursing-education programs, the university announced. The grant, from the U.S. Department of Labor, was one of 25 given to public-private partnerships across the nation to expand nursing training, APU said. While the entire nation is struggling with nursing shortages, Alaska’s situation is particularly dire. A 2022 report by the Alaska Hospital and Healthcare Association found that Alaska has the nation’s lowest pre...
Migrating birds have returned to Alaska, and so has the highly pathogenic avian influenza that began to sweep through global bird populations in 2020. That means Alaskans should continue to be vigilant about the strains that have arrived in the state from across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, experts said during a webinar June 6 hosted by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Symposium’s Local Environmental Observer Network. Alaska’s geographic position, at a point on the globe where different avian flyways converge, makes it a transmission zo...
The commissioner of Alaska's Department of Fish and Game has urged the organization that certifies seafood harvests as sustainable to revoke its endorsements for Russian-caught fish. Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang is calling on the Marine Stewardship Council to stop certifying Russian harvests. "It is nothing short of outrageous that over the last 15 months the MSC has observed Russian actions in Ukraine, assessed the implications for its Russian client fisheries, and chosen a path of...
Federal and state leaders have appointed 19 experts to a special task force responsible for creating a science plan to better understand Alaska’s salmon, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Service announced. Task force members must address sustainable management and a response to the recent crashes in the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. The group was chosen in accordance with the Alaska Salmon Research Task Force Act that passed and was signed into law late last year. The law calls for most members to be appointed by...
Alaska has the nation’s highest rate of drowning deaths, and the rate was consistently high over the past six years, according to a new state report. A Division of Public Health epidemiology bulletin released on May 31 examines drowning deaths from 2016 to 2021 and found some patterns and common factors. The vast majority were unrelated to work, even though drowning is a well-recognized commercial fishing hazard. Other common factors were failure to use personal flotation devices, called PFDs, and rural locations. Alaska has some inherent c...
Legislation to impose a state tax on e-cigarettes and vape products passed the Alaska Senate on the next to last day of the regular session, but will have to wait until next year for consideration by the House. The House did not take up the measure before adjournment on May 17. A House committee held one hearing on similar legislation earlier in the month, with members raising multiple questions about the tax and other issues. If approved next year, the bill would impose a 25% tax at the retail level on e-cigarette products, including liquids,...
A pair of criminal-justice bills that failed to win state legislative approval in the session that ended last week will be back next year. The first bill would reclassify drug-overdose deaths as second-degree murders instead of manslaughter cases. It passed the House on May 11 but failed to advance out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The measure, House Bill 66, also contains provisions that would increase jail terms for drug-related crimes, as well as provisions relating to dosing of other people, such as in cases where so-called “date-rape...
