Coastal Hazards & Resilience in the Twen

This course provides a comprehensive, quantitative, and solutions-oriented view of coastal hazards and resilience in the twenty-first century. Covered topics include the importance of coastal zones for human livelihoods, history, resources, economies, and ecosystem services; the hazards coastal communities face in the realm of flooding, salinization, water security, and agricultural productivity; the forms of mitigation and/or adaptation to these hazards (e.g. embankments, groundwater recharge, buffer zones, migration); and the basic geography of coastal environments (e.g., deltas, estuaries, beaches) and environment-specific hazards and resilience strategies. Emphasis will be placed on how resilience strategies for the twenty-first-century need consider interactions between extreme events (e.g., the 100-year storm) and more gradual changes (e.g., 100 years of climatic sea level rise); and the impact of these cascading hazards on the physical, ecological, economic, and social systems of densely populated coastal zones. The course will spotlight several case studies including the Hudson Estuary (NYC) and the Mississippi Delta (LA).