UCSD-UCSC Coastal Project Highlights Importance of Building Local Resilience to Climate Change

Climate change is a global problem — but the solutions and mitigations it requires need to take local needs into consideration.

The University of California at Santa Cruz’s Center for Coastal Climate Resilience is working on a project to explore local mitigations along with UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the San Diego Supercomputer Center, using cutting-edge technology and natural structures to model climate solutions.

The project uses game engine tools alongside coastal flooding models to help visualize climate risks, the role of nature in reducing those risks, and how to work with nature to do so.

The cost of shoring up the national and global infrastructure as sea levels rise and Pacific storms grow in intensity and power will be a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of rebuilding after a major weather event, experts have warned.

“A great deal of risk is driven by our coastal development choices,” said Michael Beck, a UC Santa Cruz marine sciences professor and the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience director.

“Increasing wave energy on top of sea level rise is going to drive a lot of decisions,” he said, adding that proactive legislation for resilient infrastructure is a tough sell, particularly when city and state budgets are already constrained by other expenditures.

“What’s going to guide most decisions is going to be the storm that comes through… More and more of our budgets are going to be taken up by recovery from these disasters.”

But there are ways to work with natural processes to create resilient communities that can withstand major changes in regional and global climate, he said — such as studying the ways coral reefs and rock reefs can break up wave energy, making ocean storms less destructive and less likely to cause catastrophic flooding along coastlines.

The work the Center does is helping policymakers recognize the value of nature as part of critical national infrastructure, with recent Executive Orders and Policy Resolutions from the governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands and the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force.

The research will add valuable data to planning and policy decisions around major weather events like the deadly atmospheric river storms that caused widespread flooding and major damage to homes and roads in the San Diego area in January. which warming oceans are making more frequent and severe.

UC Santa Cruz launched the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience in November 2022 to work with partners across communities, agencies, and businesses to find sustainable ways to build resilience to climate change on along coastlines.