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While a renewed interest in the environment has spurred the coda “Think globally, Act locally", the lifestyles of Americans continue to be supplanted by global commerce, fossil fuel, and 20th century infrastructure. This dilemma - of desiring sustainable lifestyles yet being mired in paradoxical, unsustainable conditions - is perhaps fit to a rubric of Anxious Parasitism.

Conversely, mutualism, a type of symbiosis prevalent in living systems, is a way two or more organisms coexist in a relationship in which each individual benefits. For example, Leafcutter ants – a species endemic to the Americas – harvests leaves for a fungus and in return, the fungus converts this plant biomass  into food for the ant. Thought to have developed between 45-50 millions years ago, this obligate mutualism has enabled the Leafcutter species to grow and sustain unusually populous colonies.

Compared to the Leafcutter, the human species are new to the planet; Homo habilis, an early stone age relative, dates back 2 million years while Homo sapiens are thought to have arrived in the Americas just 15,000 years ago. Having flourished during an period of abundance, it is not surprising that modern humans are mostly free-living organisms retaining only a few symbiotic relations with other organisms (ie. intestinal bacteria). 

But the period of abundant natural resources is behind us and the United States is in transition; President Obama heralds 'the era of collective action and cooperation'  while many still continue to retain monetary growth and GDP as a measure of wealth. Ecological Urbanism, arriving on the vestiges of an unprecedented global population boom hopes to reconcile an inherited consumption rate that never was sustainable to begin with. So, what does collective action and cooperation mean in terms of an ecological urbanism? How can we transition from what feels like Anxious Parasitism into something positive?

In this chapter, several climate change related risks are highlighted and possible impacts are considered. The highlighted risks are in no way comprehensive but they emphasize large-scale patterns and cover a range of issues. Collectively, the risks become a point of departure for exploring the latent potentials of beneficial-use at a local scale. Designs presented in this research were developed initially as a response to these known (yet uncertain) impacts – and thereafter calibrated (conceptually) through an effort to synchronize a variety of potentially preventive and transformative solutions. It is in this hypothetical setting – where imagined interactions between imagined solutions momentarily suspend convention long enough to generate ideas for forging a positive relationship between dredging and natural systems.

Exerpts from highly regarded and recently published works by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc) and U.S. Climate Science Program are meant to introduce the reader to this prismatic issue.

Notes: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

AR4

• Climate change is likely to lead to some irreversible impacts. There is medium confidence that approximately 20 to 30% of species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average warming exceed 1.5 to 2.5°C (relative to 1980-1999). As global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5°C, model projections suggest significant extinctions (40 to 70% of species assessed) around the globe.

• The capacity to adapt and mitigate is dependent on socioeconomic and environmental circumstances and the availability of information and technology.

• There is high confidence that neither adaptation nor mitigation alone can avoid all climate change impacts. Adaptation is necessary both in the short term and longer term to address impacts resulting from the warming that would occur even for the lowest stabilization scenarios assessed.

SREX

• Management strategies based on the reduction of everyday or chronic risk factors and on the reduction of risk associated with non-extreme events, as opposed to strategies based solely on the exceptional or extreme, provide a mechanism that facilitates the reduction of disaster risk and the preparation for and response to extremes and disasters (high confidence).

• Climate change will pose added challenges for the appropriate allocation of efforts to manage disaster risk (high confidence).

• Risk assessment is one starting point, within the broader risk governance framework, for adaptation to climate change and disaster risk reduction and transfer (high confidence).

• Management of the risk associated with climate extremes, extreme impacts, and disasters benefits from an integrated systems approach, as opposed to separately managing individual types of risk or risk in particular locations (high confidence).

• Risk assessment encounters difficulties in estimating the likelihood and magnitude of extreme events and their impacts (high confidence).

• Learning is central to adaptation to climate change. Furthermore, the concepts, goals, and processes of adaptation share much in common with disaster risk management, particularly its disaster risk reduction component (high confidence).

• Projected trends and uncertainty in hazards, exposure, and vulnerability associated with climate change and development make return to the status quo, coping, or static resilience increasingly insufficient goals for disaster risk management and adaptation (high confidence).

• Community participation in planning, the determined use of local and community knowledge and capacities, and the decentralization of decision making, supported by and in synergy with national and international policies and actions, are critical for disaster risk reduction (high confidence).

The IPCC standard definition for "high confidence" is equivalent to an 8 out of 10 chance that a statement given this status is correct.

Notes: U.S. Climate Change Science Program

• Abandon classic management models that assume a constant world in equilibrium.

• Acknowledge in our management strategies and in our models that ecosystems are nonlinear, interdependent, and non equilibrium systems.

• Use near-term forecasting tools, statistical and otherwise, that are appropriate to this class of system (for example, nonlinear time series prediction coupled with scenario models).

• Continue to identify the characteristics of systems that make them more or less vulnerable.

• Employ adaptive management strategies, such as skillful short-term forecasting methods coupled with scenario exploration models that are capable of dealing with new successional scenarios and novel combinations of species.

Climate change is projected to increase the frequency of severe storms in New England while sea level rise (SLR) will heighten its impact. As intense storms reach shallow coastal waters, they frequently generate storm surges, which are wind-driven swells that further increase sea levels. When storms occur during high tide, sea level rise can be substantial. 

In 2012, a research by U.S. Geological Survey identified a sea level rise hotspot between North Carolina and Massachusetts – where the water is rising faster than anywhere else in the world. According to this finding, by 2100, Boston may experience a rise of 20-29cm above the global increase, which most oceanographers estimate to be 100cm. This news was preceded by research published in 2009 suggesting that the SLR estimates made in the AR4 were conservative as they failed to account for potential changes in ice sheet dynamics (Vermeer and Rahmstorf, 2009). For Massachusetts, land subsidence potentially adds upwards of 60cm to SLR (Clark et al., 2008). Furthermore, damage from gradual SLR is greatly amplified by the impacts of extreme events, and not surprisingly, latest findings estimate an intensification in significant wave height of extreme waves (Hermer et al., 2013). In total, it suggests a relative SLR for Boston that is far greater than previous estimates.

No part of this bodes well for Boston, which ranks 4th among U.S. cities with the greatest predicted risk of asset exposure to SLR. While damage from a 100-year storm in 2050 is expected to exceed $460 billion in Boston  (Lenton et al., 2009), from an ecological point of view, the central problem is how to confront the gathering threat to habitats which provide valuable ecosystem services such as: climate mediation, food production, pollination, and sequestration of toxins (Levin, 2010).

Altered Circulation Patterns

Together, the Gulf Stream and Labrador Current – two important components of the Thermohaline Circulation – help drive the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a large-scale ocean circulation system with profound impacts on the global climate. The diagram above shows how the pattern and strength of the AMOC influences smaller circulation patterns in the Gulf of Maine. The variegated features of the sea floor affect the Gulf’s currents, which in turn influence the distribution and abundance of plankton. A projected 25-30% decrease in strength of the AMOC over the next century will likely have impacts on marine ecosystem productivity, fisheries, ocean CO2 uptake, oceanic oxygen concentrations and terrestrial vegetation.

Altered Sedimentation Patterns

The Gulf of Maine contains an exceptional variety of physioregions. The many basins, shelves, rocks and crevices of this area gives it a high degree of surface roughness, which increases its capacity to support an extraordinary abundance and greater diversity of animals. In addition, the shallow depth (100-200m) makes it penetrable by light, so the majority of this seascape is a eutrophic zone – a zone of primary production.

Bottom trawls, a heavily used mobile fishing gear with a rake-like motion alters the seafloor with sustained impacts on biodiversity., Georges Bank has been devastated by this technology.

A weak counterclockwise circulation in the Massachusetts Bay (Southern Coastal Shelf) functions to capture nutrients that support extensive marine productivity yet it also traps contaminants that originate in urban environments. For most of Massachusetts Bay, it takes 20-45 days to cycle (flush) the surface water.

-Seeking cooler water, some species are observed migrating to deeper offshore waters. This shift could have an impact on their larvae if their nursing grounds are traditionally in-shore.

-Historically, water temperatures have had a pervasive effect on all of the major life processes of species including growth, maturity, spawning, egg maturation, and larval maturation.

While thermal habitats and nutrient regimes of the Gulf of Maine vary from year to year, long range forecasts project a steady increase in annual water temperatures with unpredictable consequences on hydrologic patterns. These changes will likely have significant impacts on biological diversity and population dynamics of species in this region [and beyond] as cold-adapted niche species are lost or displaced by generalist species.

In 2007, coastal watershed counties provided 69 million jobs. Many of these counties border an estuary, which function as spawning, nursing and feeding grounds to 60-90% of pelagic species of commercial interest.

As such, the robustness of the estuary has direct and indirect impacts on the 254 coastal counties, which account for nearly two-thirds of the coastline population.