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Louisiana lost nearly 5,000 km2 of its coastal land area due to relative sea level rise (including local, regional, and global factors driving relative sea level change) since 1932, mirroring both the hazards associated with sea level rise and the time horizons of sea level rise impacts expected this century. This represents an opportunity to examine the relationship between long-term population changes and shoreline change. Based on detailed land change data for the period 1932–2010 and a small area population estimation technique for the period 1940–2010, we examine intra-parish population changes in relation to shoreline changes for the one million plus residents living in the ten coastal parishes of Louisiana. We find that since 1940, only two of the ten coastal parishes exhibited landward population movement, which we define as movement perpendicular to the shoreline, exceeding 1 km. Three parishes exhibited seaward population movement in excess of 1 km. Overall, we find very little net intra-parish landward population movement for the region. Our findings suggest that coastal Louisiana's historical population has not moved in concert with observed shoreline encroachment. We also find a potential tipping point related to population migration when a neighborhood loses at least 50% of its land area. Our findings suggest that this lack of landward population movement could be attributable to either localized adaptation strategies or migrations to other landward areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rising seas will impact millions of coastal residents in coming decades. The vulnerability of coastal populations exposed to inundation will be greater for some sub-populations due to differences in their socio-demographic characteristics. Many climate risk and vulnerability assessments, however, model current populations against future environments. We advance sea-level rise risk assessments by dynamically modeling environmental change and socio-demographic change. We project three scenarios of inundation exposure due to future sea-level rise in coastal Georgia from 2010 to 2050. We align the sea-level rise projections with five population projection scenarios of socially vulnerable sub-populations via the Hamilton-Perry method and the theory of demographic metabolism. Our combined fast sea-level rise and middle population scenarios project a near doubling of the population exposed, and a more than five-fold increase for those at risk (i.e., residing in a census tract with high social vulnerability) and most at risk (i.e., high social vulnerability and high exposure) compared to the same estimate based on 2010 population data. Of vulnerable sub-populations, women had the largest absolute increase in exposure for all scenario combinations. The Hispanic/Latinx population's exposure increased the largest proportionally under the fast and medium sea-level rise projections and elderly people's (65+) under the slow sea-level rise scenario. Our findings suggest that for coastal areas experiencing rapid growth (or declines) in more socially vulnerable sub-populations, estimates based on current population data are likely to underestimate (or overestimate) the proportion of such groups' risk to inundation from future sea-level rise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, tax incentives combined with the ecological significance of private land are driving the expansion of conservation easements held by land trusts. This development suggests a need to further identify efficient methods for assessing the conservation value of private land. We collaborated with two land trusts on a conservation assessment of the Upper Oconee Watershed in northeastern Georgia. We identified nine landscape-level conservation features that were important to the land trusts' missions. To weight the conservation features in the creation of a parcel-level index model, we used criteria from the Georgia Land Conservation Program. Out of 32,657 parcels analyzed, we identified 111 priority parcels that contain 2-15 percent of each conservation feature in the watershed. We recommended these priority parcels to the land trusts for use in their easement recruitment campaigns and conservation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]