The Megalopolitcan Coastal Transformation Hub (MACH)

Coastal Flooding near Tuckerton, NJ. Photo: Matt Drews

The Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub (MACH)

What is MACH?

The “wicked problem” that climate change poses to coastal communities requires many great minds working alongside local residents, officials, and professionals to better understand the options available to decrease their risk. To assist with these types of complex decisions, Rutgers University and 12 other institutions created the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub, or MACH (pronounced ‘mock’).

MACH is a part of a network of research hubs, located around the country, funded through the National Science Foundation’s Coastlines and People program. Our mission is to support decision making to manage climate-change-related risks through research focused at the intersection of natural and human systems. These collaborations are rooted in core principles regarding equitable community participation in and co-production of climate solutions.

Goals

Be Useful

Effectively facilitate flexible, equitable, and robust long-term planning to manage climate risk.

Do Useful Science

Advance understanding of how coastal climate hazards, landforms, and human decisions at a household, municipal, and market scale interact to shape climate risk.

Learn How to Do Useful Science Better

Build an academic/stakeholder partnership model that provides insight for just, equitable, and inclusive climate action in diverse coastal, urban megaregions around the world.

Train the Next Generation to do Useful Science

Train the next generation of students in transdisciplinary climate research and engagement.

Why is this Important?

Climate change is causing drastic impacts and risks in coastal areas. These impacts are projected to increase and become more widespread. While the direction of changes are clear, researchers are still working to answer many specific questions, such as “where”, “when,” “how much,” and “to what consequence.”

Moreover, the communities, buildings, infrastructures, dunes, wetlands, and other features that make up the coast are complex and constantly changing. Successfully managing climate risk depends upon understanding their dynamics. For example, rising seas, shifting storms, and intensifying heat waves create growing threats to coastal communities. Coastal development patterns, shaped both by markets and policy, can put people in harm’s way or encourage them to move to safer ground. These hazards and development choices affect community welfare and the ability of municipalities to provide the services people depend upon.

Despite the limits of current scientific knowledge, decisions are being and must be made today that affect the risks faced by coastal communities for generations to come. With aging infrastructure and housing that is either unaffordable or unsafe for many, housing and infrastructure investments cannot be put on pause; yet these investments can lock in place patterns of vulnerability that will last for many decades.

A critical challenge is how to navigate an uncertain future by designing flexible risk management strategies. Such strategies should neither assume the worst (potentially incurring unnecessary costs that could weaken communities) nor lock in place decisions that could prove costly and deadly, often putting at risk the most vulnerable members of the community, if current uncertainties resolve in an unfavorable direction. Risk management strategies need to work across a range of potential future scenarios while striving to respect the values of all the people affected.

What Does MACH Do?

Over the five years of the grant – and potentially continuing beyond – MACH is focusing on challenges faced specifically in the urban megaregion that spans Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York City. By collaborating with each other and with local residents, officials, and professionals, MACH researchers aim to advance the holistic understanding of both coastal dynamics and decision making in order to address the complex risks posed by climate change here and around the world.

Participating in MACH gives researchers the opportunity to be useful to potential partners while advancing both basic and applied science. Community partners gain access to best available science now, while contributing to the longer-term advancement of the state of scientific understanding. Through this co-generation of knowledge, all participants gain wisdom and contribute to the management of growing climate risks.

MACH researchers focus on interdisciplinary questions like:

What are the potential hazards climate change is creating for communities?
What are the impacts of these hazards on buildings, infrastructures, and ultimately the residents in the communities?
Who are the people that should have a seat at the table in deciding how communities navigate future climate impacts? And how should they be included?
What is important to community members when they are thinking about climate risk and deciding whether to invest in becoming more resilient or to relocate? What are the best ways to understand what is important to them?
What impacts do climate risks and strategies have on a municipality’s finances and ability to provide services to its residents?
How can understanding impacts from climate change be better integrated in existing decision-making systems within an institution like a city government?

These researchers are particularly well suited to support decision making regarding things like:

Changes to land use, like policy decisions about building elevation, zoning, and redevelopment
Preparing infrastructure like water and electric utilities, roads, and bridges for climate hazards
Potential nature-based solutions for local adaptation choices
How different policy and investment choices may affect property values, municipal finances, and the desire of residents to invest in their communities or to relocate
How to communicate risk appropriately for local culture and communication style
Prioritizing equity in local decision making
Integrating multiple climate strategies within adaptation pathways that preserve future flexibility in light of current uncertainty

MACH Commitment to Justice, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

As a hub with a focused mission to advance sustainable, science-informed climate adaptation pathways, MACH is committed to the authentic integration of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion into its practices. A dominant criterion in MACH’s efforts is the prioritization of locations in which MACH’s engagement will lead to benefits for populations disproportionately affected by coastal climate change hazards. This commitment is represented in the Principles of Engagement adopted by MACH in consultation with its Collaborative Stakeholder Advisory Panel. These principles guide MACH’s engagement with stakeholders and communities as well as its research endeavor.

OVERARCHING

Engagement is a collaborative process that requires adequate time and resources.
Systems must be put in place to ensure engagement efforts end when appropriate for stakeholders as well as the research team and not just when funding ends.
Trust is built and maintained/sustained through relationships over time.
Co-production necessitates exploration of topics representing stakeholders’ priorities and intended uses.
Authentic engagement ensures two “loop back” processes to ensure (a) that stakeholders are informed of outcomes and project decisions, and (b) that insights of stakeholders are shared with researchers in a timely manner to inform research design and priorities.
The design of stakeholder engagement efforts must include the stakeholders themselves.
Successful engagement requires on-going evaluation of the process and of the impact of the outputs and results.

DESIGN

Equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility must be deliberately operationalized. Attention must be paid to histories of marginalization and mistrust. Processes should seek to address historic injustices that make some populations and communities more vulnerable to climate change.
Stakeholders are heterogeneous in their needs and preferences related to data and influences.
Data and information should be made available to stakeholders in formats that are transparent, meaningful, accessible, and understandable.
Transparent decision making, expectation setting, research methods, communications, and result dissemination are critical to trust-building.
Engagement should provide meaningful benefits to communities. Research results should be shared with communities in a way that is beneficial to them.

DELIVERY

Engagement must be intentional to minimize barriers to participation, for example by respecting work schedules and cultural norms.
Partnerships with trusted local organizations and leaders build support, enhance local capacity, and improve sustainable implementation and ownership of outcomes.
Efforts to engage stakeholders must be coordinated throughout the Hub, as well as with other projects underway in partner institutions, to avoid stakeholder “fatigue.
Where appropriate and allowable, compensation should be provided to demonstrate value for stakeholder participation.
Analysis of stakeholder engagement data must recognize the fact that stakeholders have diverse views and lived experiences and find equitable and productive ways to reconcile divergent opinions.

About NSF CoPe

The Coastlines and People program supports diverse, innovative, multi-institution awards that are focused on critically important coastlines and people research that is integrated with broadening participation goals. The objective is to support Coastal Research Hubs, structured using a convergent science approach, at the nexus between coastal sustainability, human dimensions, and coastal processes to transform understanding of interactions among natural, human-built, and social systems in coastal, populated environments.

Other Large Scale CoPe hubs: