Publications
Sea Level Rise Drives Carbon and Habitat Loss in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic Coastal Zone
As the climate changes, marshes on the Atlantic coast will migrate inland and cause even more carbon to be released into the atmosphere, a new modeling study finds. Researchers developed a spatial model for predicting habitat and carbon changes due to SLR in six mid-Atlantic U.S. states likely to face coastal habitat loss. The modeling runs looked at land changes in coastal areas through the year 2104 in scenarios that predict intermediate sea level rise. In 16 out of the 19 runs of the model, inland marsh migration converted land from a net carbon sink to a net carbon source.
A Menu of State Actions to Promote Forest Carbon Sequestration and Storage
Across the U.S., states are developing policies and programs to help promote forest-based natural climate solutions. This effort is bolstered by a growth in forest carbon programs that aim to make entry into the voluntary carbon offset market accessible to all landowners. Here we present a “menu” of policy and program options (that we call action items) derived from existing state programs and policies that decision makers can leverage to promote forest carbon solutions.
Tracking the Benefits of Natural & Working Lands in the United States: Dataset Evaluation and Readiness Assessment
Natural and working lands (NWL) in the United States provide many benefits, including food, climate mitigation, recreational opportunities, jobs, and many more. There is currently no coordinated approach in the United States to track how provision of these benefits is changing over time. This project begins to fill this gap by identifying datasets that can be used to track the status and trends of NWL benefits (i.e., ecosystem services), assessing their readiness for use in the near-term, and highlighting data gaps and limitations that need to be addressed for a national assessment.
Infrastructure Investment Must Incorporate Nature’s Lessons in a Rapidly Changing World
The authors of this commentary in One Earth suggest that infrastructure must become more resilient as the global climate changes and also more affordable in the economic and political context of a post-COVID world, and that we can solve this dual challenge and drive global infrastructure investment into a more sustainable direction by taking our cues from Nature.
Global Climate Change and Human Health: From Science to Practice, 2nd Edition
This chapter from Global Climate Change and Human Health: From Science to Practice discusses how various ecosystem services affect human health and describes how climate change might disrupt or alter the delivery of those services.
Connecting Ecosystem Services Science and Policy in the Field
The authors outline the framework used to teach environmental policy instruments through the “Five P’s”: prescription, property, penalty, payment, and persuasion and then discuss the discrete ecosystem services research required to effectively implement each tool.
Integrating Programmatic Expertise from across the US and Canada to Model and Guide Leadership Training for Graduate Students in Sustainability
In this paper, the authors describe the integrative approach they took to synthesize their collective knowledge of Leadership Training for graduate students in Sustainability (LTS) with their diverse programmatic experiences and, ultimately, translate that work into concrete guidance for LTS implementation and design.
GEMS Phase II Report: Coastal Restoration
This Phase II report of the GEMS project identifies metrics available to monitor the social and economic outcomes of a wide variety of coastal projects funded in the Gulf, using ESLMs to illustrate how these projects’ impacts cascade through the biophysical system to result in social and economic outcomes. Phase II expands the focus to assess socioeconomic metrics for 16 coastal project types, including habitat restoration, recreational enhancement, and water quality improvement projects.
Delivering Bigger Change Faster
While we know that cross-sector thinking is essential, it is not commonplace. Delivering Bigger Change Faster: A Workbook on Strengthening Proposals for Projects With Cross-sector Impacts, Version 2.0 is a resource for teams that are fairly new to cross-sector thinking but already have a proposal for creating multi-sector impacts.
Resilience Roadmap: The Urgent Need for Climate Resilience Action
Building our nation’s resilience is an urgent priority. Our vulnerability to the stresses and shocks of climate change threatens US food, energy, water, transportation, and health security, imperiling our economy and our very well-being as a nation. The Resilience Roadmap project seeks to offer actionable recommendations to inform the federal government’s national resilience efforts.