Rural coastal communities face impacts from sea level rise, salt-water intrusion, and storm damage that affect local quality of life. Compared to urban areas, rural communities frequently face structural vulnerabilities caused by limited access to centralized planning efforts and unique local contexts for outreach. Compounding social vulnerabilities like job loss, out-migration, and limited social services further strain the local context while minority populations also face procedural, distributional, and recognitional justice challenges to adapt. Climate change resilience practice is designed to build capacity to adapt to climate change and environmental stresses. However, resilience work rarely considers climate justice despite evidence that ethnocentrism and privilege shape coastal management policies. Following calls to integrate climate justice into resilience praxis, we engaged predominately African American communities in a low-lying coastal region in eastern North Carolina. We used the Rural Coastal Community Resilience (RCCR) framework, which is intended to capture local perceptions to improve planning efforts by providing climate change information and initiating conversations. Further, we added a climate justice lens to the analysis in order to consider the unique challenges of the local minority populations. Engagement consisted of semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and workshops after the project to disseminate findings in the affected communities.
Results/Conclusions
To gain entrance in to the communities, a local field technician was hired to facilitate the research efforts. Perceived climate injustices emerged through the engagement revealing instances of adaptation oppression. It is likely that North Carolina’s moratorium on using “sea level rise” language in state policy disproportionately affects rural communities and the minority populations within them. As the nearby Outer Banks, an important tourism destination with high property values, benefits from state and federal subsidies for storm recovery, awareness of government programs and sea level rise projections is low in the rural coastal communities. As a result, many rural communities depend on ecosystem services related to wetlands and cannot afford built storm-mitigation infrastructure. In several instances, our sharing of climate change information negatively influenced perceptions of community adaptive capacity as mostly justice challenges arose in the focus group conversations. This study demonstrates a need to rethink traditional extension efforts to improve the inclusiveness of communicating climate science in communities that may not have been exposed previously while states must move toward policy that applies equitably to all coastal regions.