Mission 2021 divided resiliency solutions for coastal communities across three levels of implementation: Emergency Response, Long-term Preparation, and Prevention. Communities incorporate solutions from all three categories in order to fully plan and prepare for rapidly increasing heat rise, severe weather, and sea level rise. Prioritization for proposed solutions varies greatly depending on the situation and community in question. If disaster strikes a coastal community, such as a flash flood from storm surge or a sudden epidemic, Emergency Response solutions would take immediate priority over anything else. Prevention solutions address direct mitigation of climate change, to detract from the severity of future climate risks.
For MIT and its host city of Cambridge, climate change will affect the community most drastically in the following areas: public health, transportation, energy and resources, and infrastructure. For Bangladesh, the most affected areas are public health, agriculture, disaster mitigation, and emergency response. Solutions were selected to address the issues created by climate change in these vulnerable areas, and although they are specific and specialized individually, when implemented together, they address the most dangerous threats to these two areas.
In an ideal world, all of the solutions listed in our plan would be implemented within the next decade, but we acknowledge the physical and financial infeasibilities of this task. Although it may seem counterintuitive to focus so much of our efforts on solving long-term problems in light of current imminent dangers like extreme storms, for example, it is important to address both short-term threats as well as plan and prepare for long-term climate issues in order to truly prepare a coastal area for the dangers of climate change. Long-term issues must be dealt with early-on, while we still have the power to prepare for or prevent these eventual yet grave issues. Any solutions to short-term threats would be rendered useless if the sea levels rise to uninhabitable levels, for example, and we had done nothing to prepare for this known threat.
Thus, the prioritized solutions, as described in more detail on the Cambridge Solutions and Bangladesh Solutions pages, are a mixture of those that address imminent disasters, as well as those that help each area adapt to their futures as human habitats in a climate-changed world. In addition, we have selected the solutions that we consider to be most cost-efficient, implementable, and beneficial towards solving the most dire climate change threats as our priority solutions.
By Sarah Weidman and Jen Fox