Climate Change Adaptation and Ecosystem Service Resilience in Northeast Coastal Communities: Quantifying Economic Values and Tradeoffs for Regional Decision Support

The proposed project will develop rigorous social science methods that, when integrated with natural science data and scenarios from Coastal Resilience and supplementary sources, will enable users to evaluate economic benefits, costs and tradeoffs of adaptation strategies. Unlike incomplete estimates based solely on infrastructure and engineering costs, the proposed results will incorporate a more comprehensive perspective including ecosystem service values provided by vulnerable coastal ecosystems, yielding new mechanisms to inform adaptation that generates sustainable benefits. The project engages with partners seeking to assist coastal communities with hazard adaptation to ensure that results will have immediate impact. Outcomes will serve as models for communities region-wide facing similar hazards.