AUSTIN BECKER, a professor of marine affairs at the University of Rhode Island, was recently named a Sloan Research Fellow in Ocean Sciences by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, one of the most prestigious fellowships available to early-career scientists in the U.S.
Your research is by and large motivated by climate change. What is your response to those who might deny the legitimacy of climate change? Climate scientists train for decades to develop deep expertise and they follow rigorous approaches to validating their research. There are, of course, remaining uncertainties around the rates at which the climate will change and the resulting impacts that the world can expect. Many of these uncertainties depend in large part on which emissions pathway the world follows.
If we continue with business as usual with global [carbon dioxide] emissions, we can expect much more severe impacts sooner. If we cut back significantly on emissions, the changes will be more incremental. However, there is almost no uncertainty in the scientific community that the world is getting warmer, that the rate of sea-level rise will increase, and that these changes are largely human-induced and closely linked to [carbon dioxide] emissions.
All of that said, my own work focuses on the impact of storms on the maritime economy and on coastal communities. I work both in Rhode Island and internationally.
In what ways does your work tie together the social and ocean sciences? My work helps coastal communities address the question: How can a more holistic approach to planning reduce natural-hazard risks within the environmental, social, economic and political landscape? To this end, my research group is developing real-time, interactive, decision-making tools that enable stakeholders to understand and weigh the costs and benefits of long-term resilience concepts and to recognize common resilience goals.
Our dynamic and interactive disaster visualizations, driven by data from hydrodynamic models developed in URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography, can help the public and policymakers to contextualize the potential regional impacts of sea-level rise and tropical storms. These 3-D parametric disaster visualizations based on state-of-the-art ocean modeling will be used as a catalyst in stakeholder processes to enhance local decisionmaker understanding of storm- and sea-level rise consequences for coastal communities.
Our climate resilience index for seaports applies a mixed-methods approach that combines publicly available data and expert elicitation to allow for a comparison of social, economic and environmental resilience across a regional portfolio of coastal infrastructure. Metrics to quantify and compare resilience of Atlantic Coast ports will use publicly available climate, economic and social data, as well as expert elicitation, to identify hotspots of concern across U.S. ports and augment the self-assessment methods already in practice. Our methods can be scaled to the regional, national and international levels to help optimize public investments in coastal resilience and enhance understanding of investment tradeoffs.
In what ways would you like to see the state invest in its coastal resiliency? Over the coming decades, the investments required to protect Rhode Island’s coastal communities will be immense. There will likely be much national competition for resources, as the reality of sea-level rise and more intense coastal storms continues to affect the U.S. coastal economy. The sooner residents, the private sector and our public-policy representatives find consensus about a way forward, the more likely we are to maximize the benefits to society and minimize the costs. Eventually, the state will no doubt make large-scale investments in relocation, environmental remediation and/or protective structures for threatened areas. Now is the time to develop a deep understanding of the specific impacts and the range of strategies that can protect our quality of life.
