Community Climate Action

With over 5,000 miles of tidally-influenced coastline, and some of the most rural regions in the nation, Maine’s coastal communities face unique challenges in addressing the impacts of climate change. Given Maine’s significant cultural, social, and economic dependence on the ocean for their livelihoods and well-being, communities must adjust to many climate impacts including coastal flooding from sea level rise and storm surge, extreme precipitation, and changes in marine resources resulting from ocean warming and acidification.

Through collaborative climate services and research, we are co-developing and delivering programming in climate literacy, community science, climate action planning, and capacity strengthening for municipalities across Maine and throughout New England. We engage and collaborate with coastal communities, combining local knowledge and expertise with the best available scientific information to envision — and realize — a climate-resilient and thriving future.

We lead and collaborate with partners in the Gulf of Maine region on research and exploratory projects to support, develop, and enhance climate services and research processes. Through this work, we support our partners and municipalities in implementing innovative best practices for community-engaged projects, ensuring that climate action is informed by the most reliable and up-to-date data and grounded in community voice.

What We Do:

1. Offer technical assistance to community leaders and those they serve to advance their understanding of climate hazards, impacts, and response options.
2. Combine community-held values and local knowledge with relevant data to identify and create opportunities for action that embolden feelings of hope, inform decision-making, and enhance climate resilience.
3. Equip communities with tools and resources to visualize and document coastal flooding impacts, engage community members, and deliver educational programming about sea level rise and coastal flooding.
4. Forge and strengthen partnerships with local, regional, and state organizations to expand community access to resources, scientific data, engagement opportunities, and funding to enhance efficiency within and across projects.
5. Leverage the in-house expertise here at GMRI in intergenerational and fisheries engagement, curriculum development, marine research, coastal and ocean dynamics, business sustainability, and climate finance to support community resilience.
6. Co-design and conduct research projects to improve localized understanding of climate impacts, develop tools, and identify best practices through knowledge-sharing efforts that ensure local climate solutions remain effective and contextually appropriate.

The solutions we develop in the Gulf of Maine both inform — and are informed by — those developed around a warming world as we seek opportunities to collaborate, build partnerships, and develop projects with other organizations, communities, and professionals locally and globally.

We participate in and host fellows and interns from the Greater Portland Council of Government’s Resilience Fellowship program, the Colby Buck Lab, and the Maine Climate Science Information Exchange. If your institution has an existing internship program, please reach out!