Coastal & Marine Conservation

How can we how can we learn from communities to understand risk and support resilience planning? Kristen Goodrich brings a social ecological approach to characterizing natural hazards when developing flood modeling by studying the human experience with and response to flooding.

Really? A climate refugee? Amazing how that became a reality for my family last October after the passing of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The destruction it caused forced us to suddenly uproot our lives. Compared to others, we were very fortunate. Neither we nor anyone in our extended family lost their home, or had to survive more than three months without electricity.

Erik Martinez, California Coastal CommissionErik Martinez earned a master's degree in conservation planning with a focus on strategic environmental communication and media from the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at University of California, Santa Barbara in 2017. Erik previously conducted biological surveys of wetlands as a technician for the San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station Mitigation Monitoring Project based at UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute.

Erin Satterthwaite, NOAA Fisheries – Southwest Fisheries Science Center

Natalya Gallo, 29, PhD candidate, Scripps Institution of Oceanography

As coastal Floridians face rising seas, they may repeat the past — 2,000 years past. The current forecasts are for the Atlantic and Gulf to wash over Florida’s shores more rapidly, and with far more people enjoying ocean views from their homes, than during earlier periods of sea level rise. Still, ancient Floridians had to change their lives because of sea level rise — they moved inland, but not much. Predictions on the modern displacement forced by sea level rise vary from a trickle to a full-on exodus. Other experts say it’s far too early to tell.