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Coastal Communities and Climate Change
Flooding and land erosion have impacted residents throughout Maryland’s history, causing damage to buildings and loss of life. As climate changes and sea level rises, flooding is expected to worsen along the state’s coastlines. Maryland Sea Grant Extension is dedicated to helping coastal communities become more resilient to climate change and climate-related hazards.
Our efforts:
- We are assisting the Maryland Coastal Bays Program with a climate change vulnerability assessment and action plan. The Coastal Bays program is charged with protecting and conserving the water and surrounding land of Maryland’s five coastal bays near Ocean City and Assateague Island. The vulnerability assessment identifies and prioritizes climate-related risks to the Coastal Bays, which will be used in the development of a climate action plan.
- We support local government staff and community groups to advance climate adaptation efforts at a regional scale. Those efforts include helping governments on the Eastern Shore obtain grants for stormwater projects that will prevent flooding under future climate conditions. Our watershed restoration specialists are incorporating climate change and resiliency into their many projects across the state.
- We collaborate with the Deal Island Peninsula Project (DIPP) and the Engaging Faith Communities for Coastal Resilience (EFCCR) project to address coastal challenges in rural Eastern Shore communities. These projects use a collaborative learning approach to bring together diverse stakeholders, including community members, government staff, and academic researchers, to discuss environmental issues and climate adaptation. You can learn more about the collaborative learning approach in this video.
- We facilitate communication between academic researchers and stakeholders on coastal climate issues through forums and roundtable events. We also serve on several state-level workgroups addressing resilience and climate adaptation in Maryland.
Contact Maryland Sea Grant Extension
Coastal Climate Specialist
Program Announcements
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Featured Fellow
Shivish Bhandari is a graduate student in the Bioenvironmental Science Ph.D. program at Morgan State University studying environment-genome interaction in Eastern oysters. Outside of his studies, Shivish enjoys traveling, bird watching, and photography.
Featured Research Project
Controlling Fouling and Pests Associated with Water Column Oyster Aquaculture
This project has demonstrated the effectiveness of environmentally benign methods for biofouling control. There are many methods of biofouling control which have been suggested, with varying degrees of effectiveness and commercial applicability. Some may be highly species-specific, while others may target a range of species. In order for a biofouling management technique to be widely adopted, it must have the potential to be applied commercially without adding unreasonable labor demands, and it must be effective in controlling biofouling with disrupting the crop of interest, the oysters.
