Rough seas ahead

Abstract

With anthropogenic climate change poised to accelerate sea-level rise this century, millions of everyday lives and livelihoods are predicted be unevenly vulnerable to this social-ecological change. In this dissertation, I examine both outcome and contextual vulnerability by applying an integrative approach as my research design framework to navigate the problem of inequalities related to future sea-level rise. To apply mixed methods and plural epistemologies that move from the global to the local scale, I examined the inequalities of sea-level rise via three routes: (1) a global scale, quantitative analysis of country responsibility and risk related to multi-millennial sea-level rise; (2) a regional scale, quantitative analysis of spatiotemporal variation in risk to sea-level rise through the year 2050 for coastal Georgia; and (3) a comparative case study of two barrier island communities off the coast of Georgia, Tybee and Sapelo Islands, to show how race shapes vulnerability to sea-level rise. The are three primary findings for this dissertation: (1) our assessment of future populations’ social vulnerability to sea-level rise inundation indicates that the number of people at risk to sea-level rise on Georgia’s coast is more than double previous estimates that were based on 2010 population data; (2) acknowledgement and acceptance – by the professional community working on sea-level rise – of race as a process of enabling or constraining meaningful engagement, rather than as a mere demographic category, will help mitigate vulnerability for underrepresented communities; and (3) investigating the vulnerability to sea-level rise of a culture and/or place through narrative analysis of its stories and histories is strengthened by modeled projections of sea-level rise inundation and population change.