Team profile by Braydon Madson, Gabrielle Moreau, Kiera O'Donnell, Henry Park, Wenrui Qu and Nathan Yang

Climate change is causing rising sea levels, more intense coastal storms and more extreme tidal flooding, leading to a loss of land, damaged infrastructure and disruptions to daily life. Every time seawater penetrates inland, it brings with it marine salts leading to the salinization of freshwater ecosystems, agricultural fields, water bodies and groundwater.

Together, saltwater intrusion and sea level rise (SWISLR) threaten coastal ecosystems and livelihoods across the globe. Although many efforts have been made to better understand the hazard of SWISLR, the literature surrounding community perspectives, resilience and adaptation is lacking. With SWISLR impacts increasing with climate change, the community-level outcomes need to be better understood. This Bass Connections team set out to do just that!

First, team members collected papers to get a broad sense of how SWISLR was represented in the social science literature, including studies that looked at SWISLR and contained community perspectives. Then, team members extracted these studies to answer the consider what SWISLR social science literature is capturing – what kinds of questions is it asking and what kinds of methods and evidence is it using?

Once paper extractions were completed, teams of two students worked to synthesize the information pulled from the papers and create a final database of SWISLR social science. A map app was created to display this database: SWISLR Map App.

After reading about societal SWISLR impacts throughout the year, the team took a trip to coastal North Carolina to tour coastal communities currently under SWISLR threat. The team was taken aback by the numerous dead trees (ghost forests) throughout the community, even surrounding homes. There was also a clear difference between the homes owned by local residents and homes owned by people from off the island (known as “dingbatters”). We had conversations with local shrimpers and crabbers who rely on the coastal ecosystem for their livelihood.

Just reading a paper can make it seem like the perceptions in a community are very homogeneous, but based on the field trip, the SWISLR issues are much more complex. You can have people who are all in, people who don’t believe in climate change but want solutions, or people who don’t believe in or trust SWISLR research. These differences are important to understand when trying to address a coastal hazard.

The team’s conversations also reinforced the idea that academics can’t be scholarly researchers coming into an area thinking we know what is best. We need to make sure to address the human side of climate change: What do the people being threatened actually want? The most resilient solution for the communities at risk might not always be the most academically optimal or most cost-effective way forward, but with community engagement, the solution can be more successful.

Local knowledge and engagement are also important to understand the impacts of publications. Within the coastal community, there is concern about publishing data because it could be used to negatively impact the community. Throughout the year we worked to collect publications, but we did not get a clear view on the impact these publications had to the communities being researched.

This leaves us with the question: When we are researching a coastal hazard, how can we work with community members and publish data in a way that will improve the vulnerable communities and provide solutions to climate hazards?

Learn more about our project by reading this blog post or exploring the SWISLR Network website!