Among the many impacts of climate change is its effect on coastlines, causing sea level rise, erosion, and flooding.
A major way to reduce these threats is to make the coast resilient, using seawalls and living shorelines to mitigate the potential harm to both natural and human communities, according to Assistant Professor Miriah Kelly of Southern’s Environment, Geography and Marine Sciences (EGMS) Department. Kelly is coordinator of the university’s new coastal resilience master’s program.
“Right now, there are many pressures and challenges that … coastal socio-ecological systems are facing from an academic standpoint,” said Kelly, a marine social scientist. “What does that mean in real life? It means that coastal areas are continuing to see pressures related to the impacts of climate change, like sea level rise and ocean acidification, and they’re also dealing with issues of erosion and wetland loss.”
The “coastal zone” runs seaward from the mean high tide mark to 12 nautical miles in the nearshore area, and 200 nautical miles in the Exclusive Economic Zone, Kelly said. Inland, though, the definition is less exact. It could be 1 mile or up to 10 miles depending on geography and topography, she said.
“Coastal resilience is very much about trying to build communities, both ecological communities and human communities, that can withstand the multitude of pressures that the coastal zone is facing as a result of climate change and blue development or blue growth.” One of the largest of those pressures is economic development.
Focusing on coastal resilience will bring opportunities in the “blue economy” of water-related jobs or in land-based efforts to make new and existing construction more sustainable, Kelly said. These jobs include coastal resilience specialists, marine policy analysts, environmental impact assessors, and sustainable fisheries managers, among many more.
Starting in fall 2025, students in the coastal resilience program will be able to gain the expertise needed for those jobs, Kelly said.
Blue growth includes tourism, the offshore wind industry, and emerging industries such as kelp farming, she said. “One of the big focuses of the state right now is on wetland ecosystem conservation and protection,” including habitats for birds and small fish. Those efforts may compete with other coastal uses, such as private homes and industry. That’s where coastal resilience comes into play, she said.
“There’s so many great, innovative solutions out there,” Kelly said. “One of those things is this concept called living shorelines, or basically green design, where either municipalities or individual homeowners can work with experts who know how to restore ecosystems back into what their natural native function would be, while also making it beautiful and aesthetically advantageous to the community.”
A living shoreline would include planting native species, but also techniques such as using porous concrete reef balls that support animals such as horseshoe crabs.
“We have so many individual homeowners that actually own that coastal zone in our state,” Kelly said. One way to increase coastal resilience “is to work with homeowners and people in those areas to come up with collaborative and coordinated community-based projects that help come up with co-solutions that the community can actually implement and have as an enduring and lasting ecosystem service benefit into the future.”
With organizations such as the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation at the University of Connecticut, “Connecticut as a state, in terms of what we have for funding and governance, for climate resilience and adaptation and those types of projects, is very much ahead of the curve,” Kelly said.
Students in the new master’s program will learn both hard science and social science aspects of coastal resilience, said Geography Professor Patrick Heidkamp, who led the team that developed Southern’s coastal resilience program.
“The science stuff is fairly straightforward. It’s mapping issues like sea level rise, looking at coastal hazard increase, looking at increasing coastal pollutants and runoffs, and looking at living shorelines versus heavily armored shorelines,” he said.
The social science aspect will include issues such as “what is the level of support in the general public from a political perspective?” he said. “It’s making that link to translate the science into the socio-political, socio-economic realm.”
A “trans-disciplinary” approach “includes our collaborative working with people from the government sector, people from the business sector, people from academia and also from civil society,” such as nonprofits.
Students in the program will be required to write a thesis but also will have opportunities for field research. They’ll learn biophysical processes, “how coasts function from a plate tectonics and flora and fauna standpoint,” as well as mapping using Global Information Systems programs, Kelly said.
“Each semester, we have a colloquium where students will be engaged in hearing other faculty or other professionals from the field,” Kelly said. And there will be opportunities for studying abroad. One opportunity is a program overseen by Kelly in the Zanzibar archipelago, off Tanzania.
Students “might be working with the seaweed farmers to help improve their cultivation processes, to build efficiency into the system. Some of them might be working with fisheries on doing mapping of their fish stocks, or looking at mapping areas on the island where there’s different agricultural impacts,” she said.
The program also has an international study abroad opportunity with ongoing research projects in eastern Iceland.
“The Arctic is quite dynamic because of climate change, so the options and the opportunities and the potential challenges for change in the Arctic are going to be another thread that are going to be running through the program,” Heidkamp said.
Noting that Southern declared a climate emergency in 2019, he said, “this program is a direct response to the dire need of us to deal with global climate change and being able to be resilient to global climate change.”
Kelly sees a wealth of job opportunities for graduates. “There’s a lot of opportunity for students to get involved in the blue development that’s happening across fisheries sectors and the seaweed industries,” she said. “And then also, with the new port being developed [in New London], students will be poised to … have jobs in managing different operations related to the port.”
The port is “servicing offshore wind renewable development across the Eastern Seaboard,” Kelly said, using huge turbines offshore.
Other opportunities are available through the Connecticut Sea Grant program at UConn and the National Estuarine Research Reserve System, “two big organizations that do a lot of collaborative project work in the field with different universities and NGOs,” Kelly said.
“I think some of our students will also be going into NGOs or nonprofit work across different areas related to fisheries, coastal ecosystems, ocean development, a number of different areas where NGOs work,” she said.
“We have a lot of expertise amongst our faculty in addressing problems along the Connecticut shoreline,” said Professor Vincent Breslin, EGMS department chairman. “It’s a very interdisciplinary group of faculty with expertise in the blue economy” as well as coastal geography and marine social sciences.
“So we saw this as an opportunity to use our strengths to develop a program which in many ways could bolster the workforce in the state of Connecticut in terms of graduating students who would be capable of planning and addressing these kinds of issues making our shoreline communities more resilient,” he said.
For more information, visit the master’s program website.
