Friday, December 23, 2016

This past September, as students in a new reporting workshop about climate change and the environment (ENGL 721) at the University of New Hampshire settled in for the semester ahead, The New York Times published an extraordinary story on the front page of its Sunday edition. The headline: “Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun.”

The story provided a detailed survey of locations around the country that had felt the impacts of rising waters. The Seacoast of New Hampshire, with its 18-mile arc of rocky coastline stretching from Massachusetts to Maine, is just such a place.

During the weeks that followed, the students studied science about climate change, met with experts on the situation, and then headed out into the region to dig for stories of their own. All agreed at the outset that they wanted to focus on human dynamics — ways in which global warming is already impacting people’s lives.

The collection of student stories published at the link below covers a wide range of topics: from education to farming, fisheries to politics. Some provide examples of mitigation, with people taking steps now to slow global warming in the future, others of adaptation, in which communities are addressing the challenges ahead.

Read the Blog.