Coastal Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerabilities - Climate ...

122 Coastal Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerabilitiesvulnerabilities, and adaptation choices, and educating the public about consequencesand alternatives.• Improved coastal vulnerability assessments, including human infrastructureand ecosystems, by including all coastal regions and incorporating multiplefactors such as population, land use, critical infrastructure, natural resources,economic information, social vulnerability and other community characteristicsso that potential outcomes can be examined in a holistic framework of environmental,social, economic, and other non-climate factors that influence overallexposure and adaptive capacity.• Research on the scientific understanding of cumulative multi-stressor interactionsand threshold shifts in ecosystems. This includes methods to identifythe triggers of threshold responses and to anticipate the likely trajectory ofpost-threshold states under a range of future scenarios of climate and land-usechange.• Improved long-term, homogeneous, observational datasets and geologic proxyrecords for monitoring and measuring climate changes. The science of understandingclimate change and being able to make reliable projections of futureconditions will benefit from an array of linked observations and monitoringof basic factors such as temperature, rainfall, ocean circulation, waves andcurrents, ocean chemistry, sea level elevation, shoreline change, storm characteristics,and changes to glaciers and ice sheets. Maintaining an array of satellitesystems for observations is critical.• Developing advanced statistical analysis techniques for examining observationsand models of the climate system and for rigorously comparing observationswith models results.• Improving the integration of existing long-term climate, ocean, and ecosystemobservations with human-health surveillance is necessary to predict and reducehuman-health risks related to climate change in coastal areas.• Providing collaboration teams of researchers and practitioners across multipledisciplines including oceanography, climate, biology, and public health arecritical to develop and apply useful decision-support tools that reduce publichealthrisks.• Improving legal frameworks and administrative structure and tools as well asdata on zoning, permitting regimes, legislative restrictions, etc.Science-Based Tools Needed for Coastal Management and Adaptation PlanningThe tools necessary for adaptation planning are difficult to prioritize because they willdepend upon the community needs as well as where each community is in the planningprocess. Adaptation tools need to be understood in terms of input data requirements,assumptions of the method, and the reliability and utility of the outputs. A suite of toolsthat work together to support planning and decision making is described below.Communication Tools. The tools that can facilitate coastal stakeholder engagement,visioning, and consensus building include: