This volume reports on the research completed as part of the multi-year
New England Climate Adaptation Project (NECAP), a partnership between
the MIT Science Impact Collaborative, the US Government's National
Estuarine Research Reserve System, four New England coastal towns, and
the Consensus Building Institute. The first half of the book offers a
series of chapters that explain how and why climate adaptation requires
collective rather than individual risk management. It argues that most
of the responsibility for responding to climate risks--including sea
level rise, storm intensification, changing patterns of rainfall, and
increasing temperature--must be taken by local and regional
stakeholders.
While collective action is critical for climate adaptation, many
communities are not ready to effectively tackle the adaptation
challenge, and need enhanced collaborative capacity to support
collective risk management. Using concrete examples, this book offers
strategies to increase the readiness of communities to deal effectively
with the impacts of climate change. It introduces methods for assessing
local climate change risks and describes tools for evaluating the social
and political contexts in which collective action can take place. It
also shares NECAP research demonstrating that engaging communities in
tailored role-play simulations has impacted public understanding of
climate risks and local readiness to support collective risk management
efforts.
The second half of the book presents the products of NECAP, including
stakeholder assessments (showing how key stakeholders think about
climate risks), risk assessments (including downscaled forecasts from
global climate models presented in a way that is accessible to the
public), tailored role play simulations (that other communities can use
to engage residents in their locality), community case studies (that
provide statistical and qualitative evidence of the before-and-after
impact of public engagement in serious games), and the results of public
opinion polls following interventions in each community after almost 18
months.