PLANNING FOR CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE CASCO BAY REGION

Planners, engineers, developers and local officials make decisions that shape our landscape for decades to come. Despite consensus among scientists about the existence of anthropogenic climate change and a growing understanding of its indirect impacts, those local decisions are often made without taking climate change into consideration. Decisions made today that fail to consider climate change risk inadvertently increasing both environmental and social costs of adaptation to climate change. Casco Bay Estuary Partnership has initiated an effort to support climate-aware decision making at the local level. The first steps in this effort consists of gathering information on both documented changes in climate and predicted changes for the future, and beginning to look at the probable impacts of sea level rise on coastal communities and coastal resources. As the program evolves, the focus will turn increasingly towards developing outreach mechanisms to better incorporate an awareness of climate change into present-day decisions.