N.J. Sea Grant researchers will discuss climate change impacts for coastal cities at Sustainable Jersey City conference

Dr. Peter Rowe, director of research and extension at the New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium (NJSGC), will join a panel on Wednesday, Oct. 1, at St. Peter’s University in Jersey City to discuss how climate change is affecting coastal communities.

The panel, “Climate Change Challenges for Coastal Communities,” is the first of three at the 2014 Jersey City Sustainability Conference. Dr. Jon Miller, NJSGC’s coastal processes specialist and associate research professor at Stevens Institute of Technology will join Dr. Rowe on the panel along with Amanda Nesheiwat, environmental coordinator for the Town of Secaucus.

The Consortium’s involvement in the conference supports the Jersey City Coastal Communities Climate Adaptation Initiative, a resiliency planning project developed by Stevens Institute of Technology and funded by a grant from the National Sea Grant program and the NJSGC.

“The call for proposals was for researcher-community partnerships to develop models, tools, or other methodologies for coastal adaptation, with the long term goal for communities to utilize these tools in their planning,” Rowe said. “The Jersey City project was successful because of its innovative modeling techniques and well coordinated collaboration between the city and Stevens.”

The second and third panels that day will be on solutions and adaptations, and implementation. Dr. Philip Orton, of Stevens Institute and a principal investigator on the Jersey City grant, who built the inundation model for Jersey City, will sit on the third panel.

In July, Jersey City residents had a chance to review some of the model scenarios and adaptations prepared by Dr. Orton and others at an open house coordinated by Tanya Marione, Senior Planner for Jersey City’s Division of City Planning.

Some suggestions that were presented for making Jersey City more resistant to an overflowing Hudson River included building street levees and flood gates. Some sections of the city where the levees are proposed would require raising roads or land to between three and eleven feet above the current grade.