Citizens Weigh In On Climate Change

OCEAN PINES – Members of the community met with officials from the Maryland Coastal Bays Program (MCBP) Tuesday to provide feedback on how well scientists and experts rank the impact and likelihood of certain climate change risks.

As part of the Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment, MCBP officials called on stakeholders from the coastal bays watershed to voice their concerns on risks that climate change scenarios could pose to the surrounding environment and the program’s ability to reach its goals.

Frank Piorko, executive director of MCBP, explained that the organization is an EPA-sponsored National Estuary Program and identifying and evaluating these risks could prepare MCBP to be a climate ready estuary.

“The EPA felt very strongly that climate ready estuaries are just one more toll in our arsenal of good management,” he said.

Piorko said the program’s Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan outlines 14 goals through the year 2025. The EPA’s list of climate change stressors, he explained, could impact those goals.

“The stressors they identified are things that may be possible or likely to occur from climate change,” he said. “The goal of the exercise is to look at these climate stressors and see whether or not there’s a likelihood that they’ll significantly impact our management goals, preventing us from accomplishing what we are trying to accomplish on a variety of issues.”

Jennifer Dindinger, watershed restoration specialist with the University of Maryland’s Sea Grant Extension Program, said in recent months panels were formed to consider seven climate change stressors – warmer summers, warmer winters, warmer water, increased droughts, increased storminess, sea level rise and ocean acidification – and 400 associated risks that could impact the MCBP’s goals.

For example, she said, sea level rise, a stressor, could lead to beach erosion, a risk, impacting MCBP’s ability to maintain nesting sites of endangered bird species, a goal.

The impact and likelihood of each identified risk was then placed on matrices, on which residents had the opportunity to comment Tuesday.

“This is not an assessment of the risks or threats of climate change to the people, plants and animals in the coastal bays watershed,” Dindinger told attendees. “This assessment is looking at specific impacts from climate change and how those impacts would affect the ability of the Coastal Bays Program to reach these 14 goals.”

John Zajac, a Berlin resident present at the meeting, praised the MCBP for providing information and allowing the community to give feedback, but expressed concerns over the end result.

“It starts off with so many stressors that the problems become so complicated, especially when much of these facts depend upon likelihood and the scientists can’t agree on the timing of that likelihood,” he said. “So it seems to me there could be an awful lot of time spent without much really being solved at the end.”

Ocean Pines resident Bradley Schaeffer said he came to the meeting to hear about localized policy that will address climate change.

“People don’t like change,” he said. “That is why this is here. It’s [climate change] going to happen, but what resources can we work with today to lower the effect of change. For me, this stuff is very scientific, but there are a lot of arguments, pro and con, about that.”

Dindinger said results of the assessment will be used to determine what actions MCBP will take, and what resources it has, to address more likely risks.

“The vulnerability assessment helps to determine what we can reasonably work on based on threat,” she said.

About The Author: Bethany Hooper

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Bethany Hooper has been with The Dispatch since 2016. She currently covers various general stories. Hooper graduated from Stephen Decatur High School in 2012 and the University of Maryland in 2016, where she completed double majors in journalism and economics.