Afternoon and thank you all for coming.
Today, the Geography and Sustainability
Department is truly honored to host a visit of Doctor Paul Kirshen to the 45th
Annual Darwin Festival of Salem State.
Pretty amazing.
Doctor Kirshen is a research professor in the School for the Environment at UMass
Boston.
He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering from Brown
University and then his Master's and doctorate in Civil engineering from MIT.
He's also research director of the Stone Living Lab in Boston,
which we're going to probably hear about today a bit.
Doctor Kirschen was a lead author of the 5th Assessment Report of the IPCC,
and he was writing regarding the water resources of North America and climate
change.
And he was also one of the lead authors of the 2014 National Climate Assessment.
And for that one, he was writing regarding climate impacts
in the coastal zone.
The Geography and Sustainability Department at Salem State has been
hosting an invited speaker at the Darwin Festival since February of 2002.
And we are very pleased to have Doctor Kirshen with us today to continue this
tradition.
We also thank the Charles Albert Reed Trust for sponsoring our invited speakers
over the past 20 years.
And we always thank the Biology Department and the Darwin Festival
Planning Committee for giving us this opportunity every year.
The hard working Darwin Festival Planning Committee for the students.
Many problems that the world faces benefit from an integrated and
interdisciplinary approach.
Doctor Carson's research interests intersect a number of interdisciplinary
fields that would include climate change science,
climate change resiliency and adaptation planning, coastal planning,
coastal ecology, water resources, engineering,
and all being brought together to study how we can use natural systems to
mitigate climate change and to incorporate resiliency in the city
planning.
Today, Doctor Kirschen is going to describe how
natural climate approaches can be applied to the city of Boston as it faces the
combined threats of sea level rise and coastal flood flooding.
Again, we are so thrilled that Doctor Kirshen is
with us today to speak on the topic that you see there and we hope to have a nice
Q&A after his talk.
So welcome Doctor Paul Kirshen, it's so welcome to have you.
Thank you very much.
It's it's an honour to be here speaking at the Darwin Festival.
You know, from my reading about Darwin and some of
the work he did, it always struck me he was driven by data
and his observations.
And I like to think that that guy's my work too.
And so I'm going to talk a little bit about, you know,
how how the city of Boston is thinking about managing its president,
increased coastal flooding.
Before I do that though, I just want to talk,
you know a little bit about climate change in general.
So you've probably heard this, but you know, exceeding 1.
5°C above pre industrial temperature is globally recognized as a as a real
problematic threshold for managing, you know human environmental and build
systems.
So we want to keep below this 1. 5°C increase.
Unfortunately, you know, for the 12 months starting last starting
in January, this January, the average temperature of the of the
globe exceeded 1.5, it was 1.52.
So we're over that threshold.
Now.
This is partly because of El Nino phenomena,
but still we're getting very close to it.
So it's a major area of concern.
And, and this slide here just shows that over
here on my right, you see these things called scenarios.
These are various scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions.
You know how much greenhouse gases humans put into the atmosphere and then going
across you see near term, mid term and long term what the estimate
of the resulting temperature might be of the emission scenario.
And so you see like 1. 9 mission scenario in the upper left
means we hit net 0 emission by 2050.
Then after that we actually start taking, you know,
greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
So that's the most optimistic 1.
So if you see if we if we do get on that one, you know,
by the end of the century might be at 1. 4 below the 1.5 target.
But the one we're on right now is probably 4.5 or 7 point O.
And you can see, you know, with these increasing emissions,
we're going to blow right by 1.5.
We get a 2.73.6 by end of the century, well beyond the 1.5 threshold.
So we're we're entering very dangerous territory.
That's why why I always talk about climate change.
I always start off by saying the most important activity we should be doing is
controlling our greenhouse gas emissions because we need to keep below this 1.5.
But unfortunately this top graph shows in sort of the the, the, the solid lines,
the squiggly lines, those are various temperatures that are
associated with very emission, various emission scenarios.
The lower line, sort of the the dark blue one is for this
scenario called 2.6, which means we get to net 0 by 2070.
So you can see that that graph goes out to what 2500.
So you can see that we actually do get the temperature below 1.5,
but just above it there's a little dotted line which is civil rides.
So this shows that even if we do get below the 1.5,
we're still going to have continued sea level rise because there's so much
inertia in the ocean system.
So the most we can do right now in terms of civil rides is, is, is,
is decrease the rate, but we aren't going to go back to the
presidency level.
And so the only one I want to point out is obviously is,
is a link between climate change, sustainability.
These are the 17 sustainable development goals.
And if you, and if you think about them, all these are related to climate change.
So there's just another reason why we've got to get a handle on dealing with our
climate.
So now we now we go to Boston.
So on on the on the on the left, my left, essentially the extent of the colours
shows the range of 100 year flood if it struck Boston today.
And so in January and March of 2018, you may recall we had two major storms
here, each of them were roughly 100 year floods.
So you just see essentially flooding along the fringe.
But the other graph on the other map on the right shows the,
shows the fighting that would occur with around 5 feet of silver rise,
which is very possible by the end of the century.
And you see, you know, large parts of metro Boston,
large parts of Boston, Cambridge, East Boston flooded.
And it's particularly the case in Boston because so much of Boston is built on
fill.
So we, we have a real problem here in Boston
near the end of the century as we do something to manage our, our, our,
our future flooding.
And, and this just shows some images in the
2018.
So this is real time flooding and we, we could have by three feet of several
rides, which is very probable by the end of the
century.
The, the average annual damage to Billings in
Boston could be, could be around $1. 4 billion.
So it's just the average.
OK, so some storms will be more, some storms will be less,
but the average annual damage would be $1. 4 billion.
And that's just the buildings and contents.
It doesn't talk about more indirect consequences,
doesn't also talk about damages to the tee and the and the tunnels.
So it's a serious problem.
And so in in 2016, 2015, the city of Boston released this report
on a it's a broad scale assessment of the vulnerability of the city of Boston to
all sorts of climate threats.
But in terms of dealing with coastal flooding, they produce this image.
And you can see way over here on the right, it says potential harbour barrier.
And so one idea was, you know, if you look at the city of Boston here,
was to build a large barrier in the water essentially from Winthrop across,
across the Hull.
And the idea being that would have two larger, two large gates in it,
which would be open all the time for shipping unless there was a major storm.
But then if a storm came like the one we had yesterday or we're going to have
yesterday, they would close the gates and it would
protect the harbor from flooding.
So one idea was let's just build this massive wall across the harbor.
And you know, it, it grew out of this idea of this,
this potential harbor barrier.
And so the city before they could, the city had to make a decision, you know,
if we're going to build a barrier across all of Boston Harbor to protect all the
harbor besides Boston, there's big impacts on the strategy the
region is going to take to deal with coastal flooding.
But if they're not going to build a barrier, you know,
what are they going to do?
So these are just examples of some barriers, right?
So this is the one in the, in, in the, in the Thames on the Thames River in the
UK protects London.
The other one is, is the, the, the I don't,
I don't know how to pronounce it.
The mosque, the mosque barrier which protects which
protects the Venetian Lagoon lagoon in Venice.
And the other one is the New Bedford hurricane barrier down in down in New
Bedford and Buzzards Bay.
So there is precedent for these large scale barriers.
And so U Mass Boston was commissioned to put together a study and does it make
sense for the city to build a large scale barrier?
And I just want to run through that that study and then the implications for that
for Boston going forward.
So I just want to point out that it was a we're a very disciplinary team because
this project would have all sorts of impacts.
And also we had a very large steering committee and we had a very large review
committee because the outcome of our study would impact much planning and many
stakeholders.
And so a couple of guiding principles for our stand for our study.
One, we want the idea was go to barrier or
something else, protect people and places where they live,
work and play.
We didn't want to impact the city of Boston or the region's maritime economy.
And we also didn't want to set back any environmental gains since the clean up of
Boston Harbor in the 1990s and 2000.
And so this just shows there are three possible alignments.
1 was really far offshore like from the Haunt down to Scituate that was quickly
ruled out.
Then the other one is what we call the Outer Harbor,
which goes to Winthrop to Hull.
And then the other one was essentially in the Inner Harbor from Logan Airport over
to the to the Seaport District.
Yes.
But if we were to open gates all the time, wouldn't that mean Boston would just
flood?
But just like we do more gradually, OK.
When the gates were open, is that what you're saying?
Yeah.
If you open the gates and close the flood, ships pass through.
Yeah, it's just going to Boston's going to
flood anyway.
It's just going to take a much longer time.
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, eventually we're going to face in Boston,
you know, several rides of 1015 feet.
So all these strategies are just putting off the inevitable.
Isn't Salem going to be 50 feet?
I don't know exact numbers for Salem, but Salem was obviously vulnerable as
well.
All calls, all areas on our coast are vulnerable.
And you know, my, my, my philosophy is I'm just trying to
prepare the city to get through the next 50 to 100 years.
And then over that time period, hopefully they'll figure out what they
want to do, what they want to retreat or somehow
invest in something else to keep the sea out.
But my goal is just give them the time, just buy time so they can figure out what
to do over the next 50 to 100 years.
It's not going to permanently see permanently solve the problem.
So there are various configurations we looked at, but thank you for the question.
And this just shows in detail a little more on the right,
this this outer horror barrier which is the most feasible,
the one from Winthrop to Hull.
And you can see on the right, you know this is 2 massive gates on it.
And it would look the cross section would look like this.
This be a massive structure.
And this is the inner one from seat from Logan to the Seaport.
Again, these large gates, This just shows what these gates look
like over here on the left.
These are similar to the gates that the Dutch have on the,
I think it's the Rhine River.
And these are called floating sector gates.
They are when they're open, they're on land here,
they're being closed, and then they close them.
They fill up with water, they sink, they keep the water out.
After the event, they pump the air out and they swing back
on land.
So they're massive engineering structures.
And so first thing we studied it we studied was if we're to build this
massive wall from Winthrop to Hull, how would impact tidal,
the tidal range in Boston and the velocities in the harbour even with the
gates open.
And so we found out that this just shows you a miracle model we used.
So in the in the solid black is the existing title range in Boston at various
locations.
Then in green dash green is what the title range would be if you built this
major wall, but the gates were open.
So you see no impacts on the title range in Boston Harbor.
So that says a lot about, you know, certain environmental impacts because
we're not changing the title range, it may have minimal environmental impacts
may so it wasn't going to change the tidal range.
Also we looked at how it would change various velocities.
So you can see here get again various locations.
In some locations it would increase the velocity,
some of the cases it would decrease the velocity and this just shows certain
areas where it increased the velocity.
So obviously the openings between the gate opening between the barrier where
the gates are when they're open, trying to squeeze more water through
there.
So obviously it would increase the velocity there,
but so much so that would actually make navigation difficult at, at, at,
at at high tide, high tide, No, at the, at the mid tide going through the going
through the barriers.
So it'd be a serious increase in velocities going through the gates when
the gates are open.
And then also in some areas in the dark blue here would actually create slack
water like behind some parts of the of the barrier.
So it really would change the velocity distributions in the harbor.
And then the other thing we looked at this was somewhat complex,
but this was really important aspect.
You can imagine that we you know see this was built and right now the elevation of
the land surface in Boston is around 10 feet in Abd or 10 feet above mean sea
level that that's also the height of the present 100 year flood.
Looked at environmental impacts and essentially we looked at impacts based
upon water quality, habitat and I think ecosystem services.
And yes, if this thing was only going to be opened
and closed a couple of times a year, there really wouldn't be major impacts
compared to the impacts we're going to see from climate change alone.
But if we're opening and closing this a lot,
it's going to impact the circulation enough that's going to have major
environmental impacts.
And then we also looked at the cost.
So you see a number there called benefit cost ratio.
So this is the benefit cost ratio is the ratio of the,
of the economic benefits to a project to the cost.
And you always want the economic benefits to be larger than the cost.
So you want this number to be greater than 1.
So we did, we did some, you know, various analysis,
but essentially you can see here with a 7% discount rate, the discount rate, the,
the values is always, you know, well, less than one.
So that means with this discount rate, we'll now talk about that in a minute.
This project does not make economic sense.
The, the discount rate is an economic term
which let's let's evaluate future dollars to present dollars.
And so I we also looked at with a so-called 3% discount rate.
3% discount rate means we value future dollars more than the 7% discount rate.
But the point is under both these cases, it's very low discount rates.
You know, it's . 3 in one scenario all over one another.
So this does not make a lot of economic sense right now.
And then, OK, so we said, OK, the barrier doesn't make sense.
So what?
What's the option to the barrier?
Well, the option is doing something on the
shore.
And remember how I said the shore is around,
you know is is roughly 10 feet above mean above mean sea level which is brought to
the elevation of the present 100 year flood.
Actually the shoreline is not all the same elevation, some parts higher,
some parts lower.
So we looked at say somehow we could elevate various parts of the shoreline
over time.
So we would fill the low areas first, like the areas that are vulnerable right
now, like parts of East Boston and the higher
parts we would fill later in time.
So it's a stage strategy.
So you can see here like in the red, like like you see that in East Boston,
that's floods right now.
So you need to take action there to deal with it.
And then in the the sort of the green, lime green, well,
those are sort of higher points.
Perhaps we could do those, you know, near the end of the century.
But the point is this strategy, this incremental adaptive strategy of
raising the shoreline as the climate changes makes a lot more sense than
building this large barrier, which would cost $10 billion.
We have to invest in it now.
And also, we don't know what the Sybil's actually
going to be at the end of the century.
And so we'd have to sort of guess what it's going to be.
What's we, we plan for five feet, 10 feet, whatever.
And so if we, if we, if we overestimate it,
the height of the the barrier, then we'd have to, we was wasted money.
If we made the barrier height too small, we would have,
we would have suffered a lot of damage.
So this strategy of essentially elevating the coastline over time makes a lot of
sense given the uncertainty of climate change,
because we can fill it in over time as the climate changes.
It's an adaptive response.
And so we thought about, OK, how are we going to,
how are we going to do this filling?
So one idea was, you know, traditionally just build concrete,
you know, flood walls.
But these, these have a lot of problems.
First of all, they're really expensive.
Second of all, they they erode at the base.
Another reason is they deflect waves to other places.
And also they're ecologically unfriendly.
So then we thought about, OK, so-called nature based solutions.
And essentially nature based solution is a long definition.
A nature based solution is an engineered system that mimics some performance of a
natural system.
And when you think about it, natural systems are really good at
providing coastal flood protection.
So on the upper my upper left, you know, it is it's a coral reef system.
So you can see that the coral reef breaks up the offshore wave energy and then the
elevation protects against the remaining storm surge.
This happens naturally.
And then you can see in the upper right that that's that's the barrier beach at
at Plum Island.
Again, it's a natural system that provides flood
protection.
And then the bottom here we show, you know, Boston Harbor.
So Boston Harbor has like about, you know, 20 or 30 islands in it.
And these islands actually, you know, break up,
we get a major storm outside the islands on the east side of the islands,
we have like 20 or 30 foot waves.
But by the time those waves go through the island and get to the shore of Boston
and Quincy, those waves are only a couple of feet
high.
So these are these are illustrations of the way nature is inherently resilient
and and that provides flood protection for us.
So can we engineer these kinds of systems?
And of course, also these systems have ecological
benefits and they have social benefits.
They provide recreation and so on.
So can you engineer these sort of things?
And so Vista shows also the advantage of the way some of these natural systems
work.
So this is from Sandy, New York City on just outside the city,
I think sort of east of Brooklyn.
So this just shows an area in the upper in the upper image,
and you can see it's got a dune system before Sandy.
And then over on the right, it shows the same area after Sandy.
So the the the grassy dune system has protected that area.
But in the lower image you can see there's no dune system, there's no grass,
no vegetation.
And the image on the right shows what happened after Sandy there.
So clearly it was it was not protected and looks like a bomb went off there.
So it does show these nature and natural systems do work.
And So what do these look like?
So this is an example of where nature based flood management system would look
for the Mystic River just upstream of the of the of the bridge over there.
And this, this is, you know, on the ocean.
I mean, it's, it's tidal and it's impacted by storm
surges and waves.
So and for those of you that know Boston, the Schraff spilling is just over to the
right.
So you see here that that that elevated.
This is this is a design, OK, this doesn't exist,
but the system is elevated.
So the elevation protects against the coastal flooding and this would probably
be elevated maybe to an elevation of 15 feet above mean sea level,
5 feet above the present 100 year flood plain.
And then you can see that there's some some habitat living shorelines there
right near that dock that sticks out.
So it provides habitat ecological benefits.
Then finally, you see that creates open space and
Parkland to provide social Co benefits.
And by the way, this would be cheaper than building a
concrete seawall.
So this is an advantage.
This is this is an illustration of a so-called nature based system.
And this would be, you know, design engineering built, but it has,
you know, has the flood protection, but also these very important ecological,
environmental so-called benefits.
And this is another system is you know, we can't build nature based systems like
the one I just showed for for Charlestown is that choice anyway for that area of
Boston, they take a lot of space and we don't
have a lot of space sometimes.
And So what can be done to enhance a sea wall if we have to do it?
Well, one thing you can do is attract attach
tiles to it that have various crevices in it and patterns etcetera that are
designed to be ecologically friendly, so-called living seawalls.
So this is an example of a living seawall which I think is in Sydney.
And so they just have these tiles which are specially designed and they bolt on
to A to a seawall.
So they make a unfriendly seawall ecologically friendly.
And we're actually going to be carrying out some experiments with living seawalls
in Boston starting during the spring.
So this again, nature based solution, right,
we're trying to replicate a natural environment on a concrete seawall.
And this just shows an existing a nature based system in Boston,
right near Clippership Wharf in East Boston is really the only example of a
nature based system in Boston where you can see, you know,
sort of the graduation of vegetation.
It mimics like a marsh system, right, lower marsh, you know,
middle marsh and then then Highlands.
OK.
And so some of the advantages, right?
So first of all, the benefit cost ratio on these is like,
you know, 3 to 3 to 8 it with the so-called 3
percent, 7% with a 7% discount rate.
The the equivalent benefit cost ratio for the offshore barrier was like .3.
So these are over 10 times more cost effective,
plus they have this ecological and social Co benefits.
And then even if you were to build this offshore barrier in Boston,
it only closed it when you have a major storm,
you're still going to have high tide flooding.
So you still have to do something in Boston to deal with high tide flooding.
Well, these nature based systems elevating the
shoreline also deal with just high tide flooding as well as storm surge.
I already mentioned the Co benefits, you know, green solution,
less impact on the environment.
As I said earlier, one real advantage of these shore based
systems, whether it's natural or hard, is you can implement them as the climate
changes.
The flexible adaptive, we don't have to guess ahead and say
we're going to design for 15 feet or 10 feet.
We're just going to adjust as the climate changes.
And then just like a natural system, a nature based system,
an engineered system might grow stronger over time and it might be able to recover
from a storm.
You know, a concrete wall is not going to recover
from a storm, but a nature based system of a man made
living shoreline might be able to rebuild itself after a storm.
So it's another advantage of these nature based systems.
Now So what happened?
We did this study, OK, came out in May of 2018 in October 2000
of 18, then mayor of Boston, Marty Walsh said we're going to go with
the we're going to go with the nature based solutions.
We're not going to build the barrier.
And then he released this, this schematic here, right?
So you can see Boston coastline here and it's all green.
He said we're going to put nature based loop in any place we can.
So the city is now committed to doing nature based systems to manage president
and increase coastal flooding.
And but let's see, there's, there's some challenges with with nature
based systems that the city is facing, as well as other towns in,
in Boston Harbor as well as towns everywhere dealing with nature based
solutions.
So I'm not going to run through the whole list.
But one big problem, like any kind of climate change
adaptation is how you're going to pay for it.
The city's approach, you know, Boston is probably the most forward
thinking, most advanced in their thinking about
coastal flood protection among all the communities in Boston Harbor.
They are thinking about putting together, you know,
public private partnerships to pay for coastal flood protection.
You know, the city is going to pay something,
the state's going to pay something, the feds are going to pay something,
but the MBTA is going to pay something.
Dot is going to pay something, but also land owners are going to pay
something, developers are going to pay something and
so on and so forth.
It's going to every all, everyone's going to have to get together
to fund this because it's going to be expensive.
And then they're worried about, you know, maintenance is a big issue with the
nature based system.
Another problem is the permitting in Massachusetts.
It's very difficult to permit anything that's going to be built below the high
tide mark for, you know, baseball environmental rules in the 1970s.
And these rules made sense back then because they're trying to control
developers from filling in the coastal zone,
but now we're trying to fill in some parts of the coastal zone below the high
tide walk with these nature based solutions.
So the, the, the, the huge permitting authority,
huge permitting challenges.
And there are actually several bills right now in the Massachusetts
legislature to bring the permitting requirements more into the needs of today
as opposed to the needs of the 1970s.
So permitting's a huge problem.
And you know, there's all the reasons.
But also up here in the Northeast, we even built too many nature based
systems.
There's a lot in the South, southern United States,
but in the North we have additional challenges because we have these distinct
seasons.
So that's tough on vegetation.
We have a more stormy climate, larger waves and so on and so forth.
So it's sort of lack of data on the performance of nature based systems.
We need more case studies, but it's sort of a, a catch 22.
We can't get the permits to do a do a case study because of the permitting
problem and so on.
OK.
Then this just shows even if we could get permits,
it's about a two year process to get a permit to do anything in the coastal zone.
And so this is an another barrier if we could get the permits,
it's a very time consuming long process to go through all the steps about two
years.
And then there's some you know research questions,
you know biophysical research questions.
We don't know a lot about the performance of nature based systems.
And again, I'm not going to go through the whole
list, but one thing is we do design of a nature
based system.
We want to use a computer model to simulate how well it performs.
Like for that system in, in in Charlestown, the Mystic River,
like what should the slope be?
What should the vegetation be and so on and so forth.
So there's a coefficient we call the roughness coefficients,
which measures the rate.
So which is sort of the friction that occurs when water moves over a surface.
Well, we don't know what those are for a lot of
nature based systems.
So it's very difficult to do really good, good design.
And that's just one of the design parameters.
We don't know, you know, how can we put, you know what,
what sort of vegetation should we use so we can adjust the civil rise,
What's the role of these nature based systems in carbon storage,
seasonality impacts and so on and so forth.
So a lot of biophysical questions we need to address before we start implementing
nature based solutions.
Let's look at that clock.
That clock's wrong.
OK.
So I'm going to wrap up in a couple of minutes.
And then there's also equity issues.
So there's some concern that if you make something, if you like tick,
tick community like East Boston, if you make it greener and more resilient,
you're going to create even more gentrification than there is there
already.
So how can we implement nature based solutions in a way that doesn't create
more gentrification?
And so some of the work we've done in East Boston is, is this,
So this is an area in East Boston.
For those that know East Boston, this is right near Liberty Plaza where
the supermarket is, which floods today.
This was what it looks like right now.
So we're talking to some residents and they said, look, yeah,
we want green infrastructure to protect us, but we also want affordable housing.
So they said if you're going to make the area greener, you know,
build affordable housing for us right there, make it part of the project.
So this would let the residents, you know, stay where they are right now.
And so I'm going to skip this the interest of time.
I'm just going to close a little bit by saying that, you know,
Doctor Hayes mentioned this thing called the Stone Living Lab.
And this is a, a research centre.
It's research partnership to look at the performance of nature based systems in,
in Boston Harbor and beyond.
And we're looking at not only the biophysical performance,
but also the social economic performance.
And it's, it's pretty unique.
It's a partnership with UMass, an NGO called Boston Harbor now,
the National Park Service and and the city of Boston in the state.
And we're we're and we're actually carrying out a whole lot of small scale
experiments on of existing systems that are somewhat similar to nature based
systems.
So we can understand their performance.
And then eventually we hopefully get the permits to actually build a large scale
nature based system and carefully monitor its performance.
Then also we're actually carrying out a social Economic Research as well,
some of which has been done by by Salem State here.
So I just want to conclude by saying that, yeah, so, so,
so the outcome of our study and what city is doing right now is they are using
nature based systems at least till the end of the century.
Then they might re evaluate whether they want to build a large scale barrier or
not.
But by then they would have, you know, will have a better sense of what's
happening with civil rise and climate change.
And hopefully they can make a a good decision.
But there are research needs that need to be met before we can really go deep into
using nature based systems.
So I want to thank you very much and I look for any questions or comments and
thank you.
Until we get through this permitting hurdle I think we're going to be facing,
it's not going to happen quickly.
But as I said earlier, there are three bills in the legislature
right now in the Massachusetts Legislature, which are going to, you know,
hopefully improve the permitting process and the and, and, you know,
will they get through or not?
I don't know, but there's a lot of interest from the,
you know, governor on down to, you know, to improve the permitting process.
And then the other question is the financing.
And so as I said earlier, these nature based systems are cheaper
than sea walls and they're obviously cheaper than a huge offshore barrier.
So I think the communities are going to find, you know,
some way to address the financing issue.
Now, what the city of Boston is doing is
they've just had the Army Corps of Engineers start a planning study.
And the outcome of that study is going to be recommendations for coastal resiliency.
And if the city goes ahead and wants to go ahead with some of the recommendations
from the core, the federal government will pay a large
portion of the resiliency cost.
So the city's plans right now are a little bit stalled because they're going
to wait for the outcome of this core study before they take any major make
make any major investments.
So the city is, and also the city is going to do some
traditional sort of hard structures in really critical places right now because
they need to get done.
And so they're, you know, they're not going to be the initial work
may not be that green because they can't wait.
But the, the, the, I think the big hurdle right now is, is,
is, is, is the permitting, which is unfortunate because perm,
you know, these permitting, right?
These, these, these regulation processes are, you know,
are, you know, designed to help us, right?
And they're really a hindrance right now.
Are there concerns with just being completely, are there concerns with the,
are there concerns with the Yeah, yeah.
So as you know, the Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket,
they're facing a large amount of erosion, you know, particularly on their E sides,
because that's where we get our winter storms like we had a couple of days ago.
So they are facing massive amounts of erosion.
Plus many of the parts of the islands, islands are very low.
And so you probably saw the images of downtown Nantucket being flooded,
you know, yesterday and, and, and you know, parts of, of, of you know,
of, of the Vineyard also regularly flood.
I remember when I first started working on this topic, you know, in the 1990s,
I got a call from the then president of the of the Martha's Vineyard Hospital
wanting to know how high they should build the new hospital.
And actually, and they did elevate it.
If you go to Martha's Vineyard and you're in Vineyard Haven,
you look across like towards old Bluffs.
You see the hospital and it, it's, it's, it's elevated like, you know,
well above 100 year flood plain.
And then the Yellow Islands.
We care about these.
I care about is the Boston Harbor Islands.
And, you know, those are actually, you know, they, they, you know,
they have some high parts and so they're going to be around these for a while.
But those islands are really important for protecting Boston shoreline from
coastal flooding because they absorb a lot of wave energy.
So we're going to do everything we can to maintain those islands.
Plus the islands have important, you know, cultural resources, you know,
both for for the Native Americans of course, and then also for, you know,
us that came after them.
Are there any like like the places to that places?
Are there any like to protect the barrier islands that surround like Newberry Port
into The Cave and all that stuff 'cause those are going to get washed away as a
soil.
So is there any like green the nature based incidents to predict those islands
at all?
Yeah, yeah.
So one idea to protect some of these vulnerable barrier islands is obviously
make sure the vegetation on those islands you know are as are as strong as possible,
right?
You want to make sure those those, those those barrier islands are preserved.
So we want to do everything we can to make help them maintain their health and
resilience.
OK.
But that's not going to be enough because we still have to deal with rising seas.
So some of the ideas are to build like an offshore reef either out of the boulders
or oysters or something that would wave, that would strip off the wave energy.
And you know, the erosion is caused, you know,
the short term erosion is caused by we get a major storm the waves.
So if we can put build some sort of a barrier offshore,
which is ecologically friendly but strips off the waves as the water goes through
it, that'll help cut down some of the erosion.
But these offshore barriers do not cut down the height of the water when it
comes in.
It's not going to cut down sea level rise.
And so we're going to have to think about something else over time.
And and one thing is you can, besides trying to make the make these
barrier islands as healthy as possible so they themselves can adjust is maintain
sediment supplies.
And if they aren't enough, there's a process called thin layer
deposition.
We can actually man made apply sediment to some of these offshore systems,
which would let them survive.
But I'm not a coastal engineer, but it it's very complicated.
But there are things we can do to try to protect these systems.
But we've got to the most important thing we can do right now though,
is to make sure, make sure they're healthy and make sure
also like for our wetlands, you know, wetland might actually be able to migrate
inland if we let it, but we got to make sure there's land
around at where it can migrate.
You know, we can't, we can't have them bring by roads and
development.
We've got to give them space to move.
So there are things that we have to do right now to protect and let the get let
the natural environment have a chance to survive.
But it's going to be a challenge.
You know, the, the best thing again, is to cut down silver rise, you know,
control our greenhouse gas emissions.
It makes so much sense because we mainly have, you know,
a couple of feet of silver rise as opposed to 5 or 10.
We can adjust to probably a couple, but 5 or 10 is just really,
really difficult.
So again, we got to get to net 0 by 2050 and beyond.
We have a question for you over here, Paul.
Yeah, thank you so much.
You have backed in Jack and Stanley.
This is my first Darwin Festival too, so appreciate it.
We have the March right by in Central Campus that we've looked at that seems
like it would be a great kind of potential case study for managing like a
nature based solution flooding here and potentially essential campus,
but there's not many.
There's not much place for it to go.
You're kind of getting at this.
Is there any sort of like retreat or, or way that doing nature based retreat or
any apart from just creating large barriers,
especially in a place like Boston?
That's so yeah.
So let's see again with with the marsh, right.
If if the marsh can't move because it's ringed by roads and development,
the other option is, is to just provide sediment, you know,
for a couple millimetres of sediment every single year to keep up with the
rate of several rise.
And and you know, it's called thin layer deposition.
Now again, it's very difficult to get that permitted
in Massachusetts, but there's one way of, of trying to protect our existing marshes,
just sort of add vegetation on to it.
And and also if there is an existing sediment supply source for it, again,
make sure that's maintained.
And then also again, I'm not a coastal biologist.
I mean, I think you want to think about what sort
of plants should be there that they can deal with the change climate.
So, you know, you might think about what can we do to
make that marshmallow more healthy and, and, and and deal with the change climate.
And the other thing is you might also think about, you know, monitoring,
you know, the elevation of the marsh.
I mean, as a whole, my colleague Dave Burke at UNH and he
Mars at the the height of all of these marshes around UNH.
So there's technology for doing that.
And so, like, you want to just keep track of what's
going on there.
Yeah.
I just had a question.
I know you probably have some answers too.
So that's good.
So don't hesitate to speak up.
In California, there's been some stuff at the state
level to try to buy land, property from people that is along the
shore.
I'm just wondering if Massachusetts presenting more state leadership instead
of relying more on the local government to spearhead some of these things or
something like a bigger overhead.
Yeah.
No, I think by, by, you know, there's this whole concept called manage
retreat, which is essentially recognizing that we
cannot protect everything.
And in some areas we're going to actually have to let the sea take over now.
And so maybe the idea is you purchase those properties that flood all the time
now because it's cheaper in the long run instead of to rebuild and having the
state help people rebuild, just buy the property now and they'll let
the sea take over that area, manage, retreat.
And some, some towns like Hull and Scituate,
you know, are, are actively talking about that.
The I think the city of Boston still doesn't want to use that term,
but I think eventually they're going to have to start thinking about that.
But you know, there's this whole philosophy which is
very justifiable.
So living with the sea, living with the water, because, you know,
in the end, nature always wins.
And so it's, it's really important to take, you know,
a holistic, systematic approach to these problems.
And that that's why, you know, disciplinary work is so important because
these these problems require skills from every single discipline.
Do you have a question here?
Yeah, all sort of like survivable.
Is this solution, is this something that's just sort of
like putting a Band-Aid on something that eat stitches?
Or is this something that's like, OK, we're setting down the ground late or
something that's going to work in the future?
Yeah, this is a tough question.
I think Boston's only thinking ahead to around 2100 and they're, they're,
they're playing for 2100 and that for 2100, they have to do something else.
They don't know what they're going to do.
But you know, I think they're thinking it's somewhat
similar to mine.
Let's see if we can get, we can protect, you know, up to 2070 or 2100.
And between that and now we'll figure out more of a long term solution because
maybe we will have arrested the rate of silver rise and maybe we'll have
something else be different.
So we're buying time.
It's not quite a bandage, but it's it's it's like long term triage
to, you know, give us some ice, you know, give us time, decades,
half a century to figure out what to really do.
All right, You know, all care of political science.
You think all the different social sciences.
Yeah.
So you've kind of traced a lot of the problems in terms of bureaucracy and
trying to get these things done.
But you did mention public private partnerships and I wonder if you could
explain that a little bit more because I don't know how private interests would
actually be able to do something like this in a way that's sustainable for the
public.
OK.
I and my concern specifically is, is that it's being done through the
private, then it becomes exclusive.
It isn't equitable.
And you know, there's this profit margin that's there,
which is part of the reason that we're in this situation beginning.
Yeah, no, I I agree.
So let's see, at least in in Boston, there's some areas where it's very
obvious we need to take a district level solution.
You know, all the all the people that are protected,
public and private are going to benefit by doing a coastal solution, OK.
And this is generally the case.
You're actually all of Boston that if they if they if they elevate the
coastline with a harder soft structures, everybody behind that system is going to
bet we're going to benefit.
And that includes like, you know, private land owners.
It involves the city assets, state assets, assets of, of the MBTA,
assets of the Department of Transportation, the Big Dig.
So all these various stakeholders and the, the, there,
there are mechanisms that people that, that, that, that, that, that,
that can be used to share the cost.
So I'm not an expert in this, but for like, for example,
in one area of Boston, they're explored.
This is a fourth point channel.
I think one of the land owners, Gillette is donating the land and then
the city is going to pay a certain percentage and the feds are going to pay
a certain percentage and the states are going to pay a certain percentage.
So there's a mechanism there where voluntarily the, the private entity is,
is, is going to contribute to this project
because they know it's a lot cheaper to have this district level solution than
trying to protect it themselves.
Because yes, they can protect their individual
building perhaps.
But if people can't get to it and there's no water and sewage and it's shut down
during a flood and the whole city shut down during a flood and that building is
really useless.
So the, the private sector has a lot of incentive
to get involved in these, these district level plans.
And I and I and I, and I think you maybe were enlightened in
Boston.
But you know, when I talk to, you know, developers and, and people that own large,
you know, commercial buildings, they want they, they,
they want to share on these costs because they see a lot cheaper than going it
alone.
I can just ask, so would Gillette would not be getting
anything in return for giving up the land.
They would get flood protection.
So they give up some land and they get flood protection.
So that that's, that's how they, you know, did the calculus and said it's cheaper
for us to give up this land than having to pay for our own flood protection.
And so, so I, I, so I, I, I'm feeling confident we're going to have
these public private partnerships.
And also I'm personally optimistic.
I also think like, you know, the MB, the MBTA has got a lot of financial
problems, but eventually it's going to get
straightened out and they have revenue streams, dot has got revenue streams.
And so I think with these revenue streams, they're going to be able to work with the
city and the state to finance the adaptation that's necessary in in in
metro Boston.
Probably got time for one more question.
And I know Captain Upfront has a follow up before I asked Cat for that final
question.
Tara Gallagher, the Co chair of the Earth Days festival,
which remembers in April, asked me to mention that during that
festival in April, we will be showing inundation district.
Oh, yeah.
Which I guess is about sea level rise, which is from seaport in the seaport.
That's that's supposed to be a good film.
And the director's going to come here.
Oh, David Abel, that's April 12th.
Is that what it is?
Yeah.
Frank, what's your name?
Thank you.
One last follow up question.
I'm sure it's something we can research on our own, but as common people,
you know, every day who are growing up into this,
what can we do to help?
Yeah.
In terms of the greenhouse gas.
OK, so a couple of answers.
One is obviously in your lifestyle, you want to minimize your your carbon
footprint.
So also it's a way of doing that, right?
1 is a vegetarian diet.
One is, you know, what kind of car you drive,
where you live, where you keep your thermostat at in the
summer and winter, how much you travel, you know, where you get your clothes made.
You know, there are all things we can do to limit
our carbon footprint.
And so we should all be thinking about that.
The other thing is, is how you vote, OK.
You know, we live in a well, yeah, we live in a democracy.
And it's really important that we get the right people in the right position that
are going to make the right decisions.
And so voting is really important if you if you believe in this issue.
And the other thing is, you know, talk to people, you know,
talk to your peers, talk to your, you know, siblings,
talk to your parents about this problem.
Because like we're entering, as I said earlier,
we're entering dangerous territory, right?
You know, sometime in pretty much no matter what we
do in 20-30, we're going to exceed this this threshold
of 1. 5°C increase in global temperature above
pre industrial.
And there's plenty of literature about how bad that is.
And so if we do get, but you know, so no matter what we do and if we get to
0 emissions today, we're still going to hit 1.
5 in 20-30 or so.
But if we do get to net zero really quickly,
we're going to get to go start going down after, you know, later in the century.
So it's really important to get to this net 0 and we really got to keep pushing,
pushing, pushing on that.
And that's also has to be done globally, right?
And the other thing is, you know, the expression from the 60s, right?
You know, think global, act local and it's so relevant to today.
So thank you.
Great.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.