About This Project
Description
Climate change brings both risk and opportunity to coastal New England. States and municipalities are making rapid progress developing coastal and climate adaptation plans that focus on problems such as infrastructure planning, natural resource management, and emergency response. Now is an ideal opportunity to share progress across networks and identify common ways to help each other bring these plans into action. It also remains a challenge to comprehensively link the economic, demographic, and ecological forces associated with long-term change and global connections. For example, Arctic ice melt with new connections to northern ports will bring new economic activities such as shipping, trade, resource extraction, fishing, and tourism -- even as it accelerates sea level rise, severe weather, and other ecological changes.
This project, funded by the National Science Foundation Coastlines and People (CoPe) program will consider the resilient urban planning and landscape design needed for the smaller cities and towns of northern New England to grow into the future vibrant, sustainable, and adaptable coastal cities of 2120. Stronger partnerships among scientific, business, governmental, non-profit, and neighborhood groups will advance the exploration of visionary futures and expand the scope of research and educational initiatives that inform coastal climate adaptation.
A central goal is to determine what types of data and knowledge will help communities align incremental adjustments with more integrated visioning of uncertain futures involving urbanization, in-migration, and transformative paradigms in science and engineering. Focus group discussions will highlight the built environment and implications of more diversified economic and demographic futures for socio-ecological resilience, thereby embracing uncertainty and anticipating transformative change. A primary outcome will be a collection of student internship projects engaging communities and private industry in CoPe science through student learning as a boundary spanning activity. Workshop outcomes will benefit society by developing an understanding of how coastal resilience to environmental variability and hazards might synergize with urbanization and economic growth.
A note on the challenge of straddling timeframes
(click arrow for more)We recognize it can be difficult to address unknown uncertainties, worst-case scenarios, and century-scale timeframes. It is nonetheless important to provide the space for these conversations, even though we have to apply current information and values to interests of future generations and receive minimal benefit during our own lives,. This type of visionary thinking can encourage new processes for decision-making, highlighting the competing short-term and long-term benefits, identifying promising future technological solutions, and proposing plausible long-lasting collaborative governance mechanisms.
Adopting a future mindset is especially demanding today, given that most of society is currently focused on the immediate needs of COVID-19. However, unanticipated extreme events are precisely what we hope thinking about uncertainty and long-term change will help us prepare for. We therefore encourage participants to bring lessons learned from the pandemic to the discussions, including the surfacing of formerly invisible interdependencies and vulnerabilities within our communities as well as inspiring examples of resilience.
Our Team
Investigators: Terry Shehata, Maggie Vishneau, Jennifer Brewer, Katharine Duderstadt.
Facilitator: Carole Martin
Organizing Committee and other contributors: Keith Bisson, Beth Bisson, Curtis Bohlen, Heather Caruso, Abby Coe, Alyson Eberhardt, Valerie Franks, Kristen Grant, Carla Guenther, Aeowyn Kendall, Sarah Kirn, Tom Meyers, Troy Moon, Nathan Robbins, Addy Smith-Reiman, Maingi Solomon, Esperanza Stancioff, Tod Vanzandt, and Lisa Wise