About this lecture series
Lectures of Opportunity (LOOs) offer Naval War College (NWC) students, faculty, and staff an opportunity to learn more about national and international socio-political subjects that may be of relevance to the NWC community.
Synopsis
Storm resilience and climate adaptation has long been acknowledged as a “wicked problem” for planners and policy makers. The uncertainties in rates of climate change and the lack of significant resilience funding leave decision makers unsure as to which adaptation option(s) to pursue, on what timescale, and how to pay. In the coming decades, many communities will be forced to adopt so-called “transformational adaptation” strategies such as the construction of storm barriers, the reorganization of vulnerable systems, or changes in their locations. Such strategies can take decades or more to plan, design, find consensus around, fund, and ultimately implement. Before any meaningful decisions on climate change resiliency can be made, however, a shared understanding of risks,consequences, and options must be generated and allowed to percolate through the system to those who deal with such issues. These research projects develop new tools that policy makers, the public, and other stakeholders need in order to effectively weigh the costs and benefits of resilience investments that will be necessary in the coming decades. This presentation will provide an overview of three such tools: disaster visualizations created in the Marine Affairs Visualizations Lab; a seaport vulnerability index methodology; and public processes that utilize “boundary objects” to engage stakeholders in meaningful dialogue around resilience.