Climate Adaptation Strategies

Adaptive management of CCS regulation:
The technology for carbon capture and deep geological sequestration holds great promise for reducing CO2 emissions. However, we currently lack understanding of a number of key issues including the risks of CO2 leakage and means of quantifying leakage, the availability and applicability of technologies to manage sequestration sites, and large-scale impacts to groundwater flow. Better understanding will require study of large-scale CO2-sequestration projects. An adaptive approach to regulating CCS would allow regulations to evolve over time as they incorporate new knowledge from projects… [+more]

Water implications of low carbon energy production:
Climate change will likely have large impacts on the frequency and distribution of precipitation and on evapotranspiration. We address three key issues: 1) water needs associated with existing and new energy technologies; 2) changes in the statistics of drought in the U.S.; and 3) impacts on electricity demand if technologies for water desalinization become common… [+more]

Changing hurricane tracks and long-term flood risk insurance:
An approach for long-term flood risk insurance that would enable a feedback link from insurance providers to insurance clients and make it more attractive for the latter to increase the safety of their buildings needs to account for long-term changes in U.S. hurricane landfall statistics. We have shown that current ways of characterizing and assessing U.S. hurricane landfall risks are insufficient given possible but currently unknown impacts of global warming on hurricanes) and Atlantic multidecadal variability entailing periodic increases of up to 100% in major hurricane landfall risk… [+more]

Benefit-cost assessment of potential hurricane modification:
Given the growing exposure to losses from hurricanes, and the potential the climate change may exacerbate future exposure, we are interested in addressing the following issues: 1) how much of a change might foreseeable types of interventions produce, and if these changes played out exactly as anticipated, how much might they reduce damages?; 2) given that there will inevitably be uncertainty associated with the outcome of any intervention, how much must that uncertainty be reduced before one could be confident that the intervention would have a positive net benefit?; and 3) is it scientifically plausible that uncertainties could be reduced by this amount? [+more]

Thermal and acidification impacts on ocean biota:
Concern has recently increased that climate-induced changes are threatening ocean biota, especially those associated with coral reefs. Of particular concern in the Florida Keys and other areas with high levels of tourism are onshore development that generates increased waste loads to coastal waters, and increased cruise ship traffic. Management options include onshore land use and waste treatment requirements, further restrictions on offshore dumping from ships, and limitations on ship traffic and dredging. There has been talk of local efforts to control pH near selected coral reefs. The feasibility and effectiveness of these local management options is greatly uncertain… [+more]