Preparing for and adapting to these outcomes—whether by abandoning coastal land, adapting through crop rotation or impoundments, or restoring lost marshes, for example—will require difficult decisions by landowners and planners, as well as financial resources and engineering innovations. A range of policies and institutions, such as conservation programs, that influence these decisions and their consequences can ease or aggravate environmental and social outcomes. An interdisciplinary approach is therefore needed to understand the tandem hazards of saltwater intrusion and sea level rise (SWISLR) and to mitigate the risks they pose.

Toward those ends, a community of natural and social scientists, experts from conservation-focused nongovernmental organizations, representatives from state and federal agencies, extension specialists, and rural NACP stakeholders set out in 2022 to build a connective intellectual network focused on SWISLR. The network sought to expand collective capacity to predict and prepare for SWISLR impacts in rural communities through sharing and synthesis of knowledge about coastal social and environmental change.