Adaptive capacity (AC) is a widely used concept denoting assets or resources that people or a system can draw upon to cope with environmental change. When applied to a community, careful definition and measurement of AC is essential for identifying patterns and generating findings that may be useful for policy and transferable to other places. We identified and compared measures of 22 indicators for eight communities on Alaska’s North Slope, based on consistency with theory, availability of data, and measurable community differences. Despite many cultural and institutional similarities, we found systematic differences among communities in each of the seven AC domains measured. Although every community had strengths in some domains, we could divide communities into three groups: high overall AC (one community), moderate overall AC (four communities), and low overall AC (three communities), based on average rank order across all domains. The comparative approach we developed can be helpful in identifying productive policy opportunities for strengthening community AC.

中文翻译：

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比较北极社区应对环境变化的适应能力

适应能力 (AC) 是一个广泛使用的概念，表示人们或系统可以利用以应对环境变化的资产或资源。当应用于社区时，仔细定义和衡量 AC 对于识别模式和产生可能对政策有用并可以转移到其他地方的发现至关重要。我们根据理论的一致性、数据的可用性和可测量的社区差异，确定并比较了阿拉斯加北坡八个社区的 22 项指标的测量值。尽管在文化和制度上有许多相似之处，但我们在所测量的七个 AC 领域中的每一个领域中都发现了社区之间的系统差异。虽然每个社区在某些领域都有优势，但我们可以将社区分为三类：总体 AC 高（一个社区），根据所有域的平均排名顺序，总体 AC 中等（四个社区），总体 AC 较低（三个社区）。我们开发的比较方法有助于确定加强社区交流的生产性政策机会。