In the next few lectures, we're going to look at the regional impacts and adaptation opportunities illustrated in the chapters of the National Climate Assessment. Compared to the sectoral chapters, the regional chapters are longer and offer greater detail and specificity about some of the local experiences with impacts, as well as the actions being pursued on the ground. For brevity, I've combined a number of the regions with their neighbors and I'm only grabbing a sample of the key messages. I encourage you to check out the chapters online on your own to get the full story. Another point of distinction between the regional and sectoral chapters. Many of the regional chapters tried to tell the story of the important values in a region, rather than just launch into a laundry list of bad things that climate change might do. For example, in the Northeast and Southeast, we read a lot about the coasts in the middle a country we get a view into the importance of agriculture, and rural communities where agriculture is really critical and out west we hear about the importance of water quite a bit. By understanding what's unique and valuable within each region, it can give us a better understanding of what's at risk and why people care. With that framing, let's start on the first lecture for the regions that focuses on the Northeast and the Southeast. One of the unique things about the East and especially the Northeast is the importance of many urban centers, and these centers are important economically, culturally, and historically. Many of these cities are on or near the coast and they have experienced an uptake in flooding. This image shows flooding in Charleston, South Carolina, a place that has seen some catastrophic flooding in recent years. That rate is construction, that's part of a drainage improvement project that will hopefully make future events less disruptive and less destructive. Well, Charleston has certainly been a hotspot for flooding recently. There are a number of cities across both the Northeast and Southeast, where you could identify similar needs to improve the storm water conveyance systems. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Tampa, New Orleans. Almost all these places are exposed to coastal flooding and in a lot of these locations, the existing infrastructure is already pretty old, making the need to upgrade that much more urgent. Now, in this map on this slide, we're showing the extent of a warm water anomaly in the ocean, something that we can also call like a marine heatwave, and this one in particular occurred in the summer of 2012. You can see that the waters along the North Atlantic were relatively warm from about North Carolina all the way up to Greenland, and this caused a real shock to fisheries in the region especially in New England. This situation is not unique to just North Atlantic, we've seen periods of anomalously warm water become more common across the world's ocean. It not only causes problems for aquatic life, but in areas where we have tropical storms, this warm water can help hurricanes gain energy and strengthening. We've seen this type of rapid intensification of tropical storms, occurring over warm coastal waters during some of our recent big storms like Hurricane Harvey that struck near Houston in 2017, and Hurricane Laura that came a shore in Louisiana in 2020. Here's another coastal image, perhaps a little less dramatic than our flooding picture from before. This comes from coastal New Jersey where wetlands are encroaching on a forest in area. The white cedars that you see on the left side of the photo are losing their real-estate as the land becomes inundated, and there's probably some salinization of the water and soil where the cedars are as well. In this relatively undeveloped setting, the consequences of this wetland encroachment is primarily ecological. The forested area will over time give way to the more marshy estuary, plants, and animals along other parts of the east and Gulf coast, the situation is little different. That transition can be really challenging when there's actually a community there, and that community might be in the way of the encroaching wetland. As we raise flood risks for the community by this kind of encroachment, we're also diminishing some of the biodiversity and some of these ecosystems that can actually act as a flood buffer or a flood barrier. This encroachment can have some important dimensions for our towns and cities as well. Continuing with the idea of communities getting squeezed by rising seas, this photo shows a community meeting for the ILDe Zhong Charles tribe as they work through their plan to relocate from their ancestral home in coastal Louisiana. The tribe is come to the difficult decision to relocate farther inland, as recent levy work and rising sea levels have combined to make it difficult to maintain their current location. The tribe has been documenting and sharing the process that they've been pursuing which is really fascinating. One of the documents, they've produced is a field guide and in my opinion, it's incredibly insightful in laying out the technical decisions like choosing a new site for relocation, as well as the process issues in coordinating across their community, and forming coalition of supporters and funders more broadly even outside their community. They also tackle some thornier yet crucially important issues such as maintaining their sovereignty, as many outside agencies become engaged in their relocation process. In many ways, this community is one of the pioneers in dealing with the coastal relocation challenge. What they're going through in at least in part, is likely to happen in other communities, both tribal and non-tribal in the coming decades. That concludes the Northeast and Southeast chapter. Thanks for your attention and we hope you'll join us for the Northwest and Southwest lecture which will be coming up next.
