Taylor Walters - March 12, 2026: Sea Level Rise (Free-Choice Entry)

Last year I did a geospatial science project on the effects of rising sea levels on Rodanthe, North Carolina, which is a small beach community on the Outer Banks. I want to write about it here because I think it connects to what we've covered in class about the Tragedy of the Commons and it changed how I think about the coast. Rodanthe is one of the most vulnerable communities on the East Coast. It's on a narrow barrier island with the ocean on one side and the Pamlico Sound on the other. Sea level rise and increased storm intensity are already causing houses to fall into the ocean. Several homes have literally collapsed onto the beach in recent years. Using GIS mapping tools I was able to visualize how project sea level rise scenarios would affect the shoreline over the next several decades and it was shocking to see it presented spatially in a way that data tables don't really show. What the project made me think about was the people and how these are families who have lived on the Outer Banks for generations. They aren't hypothetical statistics at all, in fact they are directly experiencing the Tragedy of the Commons. These families didn't individually cause climate change, but they are some of the first to directly experience the effects of it. It seems that the communities with the least political power and the fewest resources to adapt are often the ones most exposed to the consequences of decisions made by previous generations that did not consider the repercussions in the future.

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