Stories from the Field

The polarizing debates over climate change are often about the wrong questions. I go nuts when I hear people debating belief in climate change. Some things are facts, and the beauty of facts is they don’t require you to believe in them in order for them to be true. One can dislike that the climate…

When your research project aims to have a real-world impact, you’ve got to work with real-world actors.  No, not the Hollywood kind.  I mean the citizens, professionals, and public officials that live, work, and play where the research is taking place.  These actors don’t read any scripts.  They don’t need to. They know their town,…

As an undergraduate researcher for NECAP, I have spent this past semester studying the survey responses from simulation participants in all four towns. By taking participants’ thoughts and reactions to the role play games and representing them numerically, we can observe trends and make broader observations about how communities can best adapt to climate change.…

As an engineering student, I am all too familiar with the process and mathematics that go into modeling ecosystems and climate change. However, as I sit in class and watch my ecology professor describe exactly how a hurricane follows the second law of thermodynamics, I often lose track of the why? Why do I need…

Early this month, two University of New Hampshire reports analyzing the future climate of Northern and Southern NH were released. The results are concerning, to say the least. The main takeaway from these two assessments is that, as the climate continues to change, New Hampshire will become warmer and wetter. The yearly average temperature could…

At MIT, engineering students are taught to ask the tough questions. We are encouraged to use math and science principles to tackle the world’s largest problems, pushed to dive into everything from cancer research to global health crises to climate change. Since coming to the institute in 2010, I have been inspired by my peers…

I joined the NECAP team in February after all the fieldwork had been completed. Instead, this semester the gigantic challenge of data analysis has faced the team.  We have extensive statistics from before and after surveys given during the roleplaying games in addition to demographic and town wide data. It’s been daunting making sense of…

My parents tell me that when I was a young child, I loved to run in front of people swinging on swing sets. Regardless of how many times my parents warned me of the dangers of getting hurt, I insisted on running in front of people, until one day I was hit on the head…

Over the past year and a half, NECAP has collected and generated a staggering amount of rich data. For each of our four partner towns, we now have: community-wide data from our Triton polls, a Stakeholder Assessment, a Risk Assessment, before- and after-survey data from each of numerous workshops, notes from the debriefing section of…

In the New England Climate Adaptation Project, MIT is working with four at-risk coastal communities in New England [Dover, NH; Wells, ME; Barnstable, MA; Cranston, RI] and four nearby National Estuarine Research Reserve System sites [Great Bay Reserve, Wells Reserve, Waquoit Bay Reserve, and Narragansett Bay Reserve]. All four communities are projected to experience significant…