Climate change, globalization, and the double exposure challenge to sustainability: Rolling the dice in coastal New Jersey

Abstract

Climate change and globalization present significant challenges for-sustainability. Both processes enhance connections across space and time, such that actions taken in one part of the world have increasingly visible impacts in other parts of the world. The processes also magnify risks and uncertainties, exacerbate vulnerabilities, and undermine resilience to many types of shocks and stresses. This chapter explores how climate change and globalization are together influencing sustainability in urbanized coastal zones with particular emphasis on coastal New Jersey. While urban coastal zones have long confronted a multitude of development-related stresses including reductions in quantity and quality of freshwater flow into estuaries, destruction and degradation of wetlands, and dredging and development of harbor areas, climate change and globalization represent new and interconnected sources of stress. Under climate change, altered temperature regimes, shifts in the variability and seasonality of precipitation, increases in the frequency and magnitude of extreme events, and sea level rise are together transforming the environmental baseline of coastal areas. At the same time, processes of globalization are contributing to growth of coastal tourism, intensification of coastal property investment, expansion of port facilities and shipping traffic, and changes in the availability of public funds needed to manage these complex, coupled systems.