Planning for Impacts of Climate Change at U.S. Ports

U.S. ports need to better understand climate change and how it may affect them. In the coming decades, ports are likely to experience higher sea levels and storm surges, as well as other direct and indirect impacts, due to climate change. Most ports do not appear to be thinking about, let alone actively preparing to address, the effects of climate change. Ports do not have specific information about either the types of impacts that they can expect on their facilities or the probabilities of different types of impacts occurring. Although climate change science is making considerable advances, projections of impacts at levels smaller than the regional scale are not available. In addition, ports’ typical planning processes are ill equipped to respond to the high levels of uncertainty associated with the impacts of climate change, the timescales of climate change, and the geographical scale of climate change. The data that ports typically use for planning purposes do not incorporate climate change forecasts. Some ports also believe that climate change does not pose an immediate threat to their facilities. However, several ports are beginning to think about how to prepare for climate change. These include the Port of Miami (Miami, Florida), the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Massachusetts Port Authority, the Port of Seattle (Seattle, Washington), the Port of Corpus Christi (Corpus Christi, Texas), and the Georgia Ports Authority. To help these and other ports assess their risk, more and better data are needed, as well as better planning tools and methods.