A call to action: The inception of the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge
By Claire Martin
This month, students from five leading design and architecture schools will begin poring through the latest climate research and identifying the unique coastal challenges faced by the Island of Nantucket. Next month, they will begin hearing weekly from experts in the field, engaging with a group of Nantucket advisors and gaining insight from stories of island locals. Throughout the course of a spring design studio, these interdisciplinary university teams will research possible solutions and propose adaptive pathways forward for Nantucket in the face of sea level rise.
The Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge, with the goal of inspiring Nantucket and other coastal communities around the world to envision innovative adaptations to sea level rise, began as a call to action. In the fall of 2019, Wendy Schmidt—founder of ReMain Nantucket—and the team at ReMain Nantucket sat down to talk about sea level rise: a dire issue for coastal communities around the globe. On Nantucket, a small community 30 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, sea level rise is not just imminent, it is already happening.
“The reshaping of the world due to the forces of climate change is a crisis that has been happening for 100 years,” said Wendy. “For coastal communities, island communities like Nantucket, you see the impact of climate change in sea level rise. We see it every time there’s a big storm, every time there’s a super high tide. Vital areas of downtown Nantucket are flooded regularly.”
In October 2019, Nature Communications journal published new research by the science and news organization Climate Central that found that by 2100, more than 200 million people globally will be living below sea level. Sea level rise will lead to flooding events that will impact another 160 million people in the same timeframe.
“How are we going to live in a world where our coastlines will change? All of our economies, our environmental connections will all shift. How are we going to do that together? We don’t really have the choice: We have to take the challenge.”
Last September, the Town of Nantucket officially adopted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s “High” Sea Level Rise Scenario for planning purposes. Under this projection, Nantucket would regularly see the waters surrounding the island rise by 4.13 feet above local mean sea level rise by 2060, 6.36 feet by 2080 and 9.25 feet by 2100.
Those numbers are daunting. But as Wendy reflected over the summer, the group at ReMain hopes to inspire the community to begin to think differently about climate-related issues and consider innovative ways forward. How do we showcase what it means to live with water? To creatively adapt?
“How are we going to live in a world where our coastlines will change? All of our economies, our environmental connections will all shift. How are we going to do that together?” asked Wendy. “We don’t really have the choice: We have to take the challenge.”
And with that, the vision for an exercise in academic thinking was born. The Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge aims to inspire Nantucket residents to consider what adaptation can look like.
The relative sea level trend is 3.75 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.34 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1965 to 2019 which is equivalent to a change of 1.23 feet in 100 years; Relative Sea Level Trend Nantucket, MA NOAA interannual variation. (Courtesy National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
“ReMain Nantucket has assembled an extensive breadth of resources including mapping and data, world-renowned researchers and practitioners focused on climate change and on-island advisors who will facilitate student engagement with the community of Nantucket,” said Bob Miklos, founding principal of Boston-based firm designLAB architects and co-chair of the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge Advisory Committee.
The Challenge has brought together a group of 24 local advisors with expertise in history, architecture, art and engineering; conservation, real estate and fisheries. It has convened five leading design schools: University of Florida College of Design, Construction and Planning, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, University of Miami School of Architecture, The School of Architecture at Northeastern University and Yale School of Architecture. And now, dozens of young minds are considering how to move this island forward.
“We are very excited to have an amazing group of academic partners participating in the Challenge,” said Bob. “Each partner institution brings a significant body of research, analysis and design expertise focused on coastal resilience issues, having already explored strategies for sea level rise adaptation in their previous studio work. Through our preliminary planning process with our partners we have crafted an interdisciplinary approach where teams share experience, resources and discovery, while developing approaches informed by each other in a collaborative rather than competitive environment.”
The 2021 spring semester design studio is being led by Challenge Coordinator Carolyn Cox, of the Florida Climate Institute. In addition to Bob, the advisory committee is co-chaired by Marty Hylton, director of the University of Florida Historic Preservation Program and the Center for World Heritage Research and Stewardship.
“The innovative and broad approaches to Nantucket’s challenges developed by the studio teams can serve as a resource for other coastal communities as they address our worldwide issues of climate change in their own place. We hope that the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge will provide a new academic model for interdisciplinary work and ‘practice-based’ learning that other universities can adopt.”
“The innovative and broad approaches to Nantucket’s challenges developed by the studio teams can serve as a resource for other coastal communities as they address our worldwide issues of climate change in their own place,” said Bob. “We hope that the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge will provide a new academic model for interdisciplinary work and ‘practice-based’ learning that other universities can adopt.”
How it might serve as a model for other coastal communities, and universities, is perhaps one of the most exciting elements of the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge.
“I’ve long held the view, and ReMain holds the view, that what happens in small places is often a microcosm of what can happen in larger places,” said Wendy. “We’re not going to have all the answers, but we might develop a process and it will be an inclusive process that involves the self determination of the communities as well as the best practices and the best minds.”
To learn more about the challenge, visit https://www.envisionresilience.org/challenge.
