William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review
Abstract
The world’s coastlines are changing as a result of climate change and ocean acidification, creating drivers of human adaptation efforts— efforts that may increasingly include migration inland. Rising sea levels tend to get most of the attention as coastal migration drivers, because they represent the force most likely to physically push residents away from the coast through inundation, coastal erosion, and/or destruction of coastal water supplies.
However, climate change and ocean acidification are also changing the world’s coasts ecologically, and these ecological changes also drive coastal adaptation, testing the adaptative capacity and ecological resilience of coastal communities. This Article examines coastal adaptation to climate change and ocean acidification impacts through the lens of resilience thinking. It argues that resilience assessments need to embrace coastal communities’ status as complex social-ecological systems (SESs) and to assess their resilience to ecological as well as physical changes— that is, to the changes occurring in the ecosystems on which these communities depend.