Barbara Quimby.
HPU Assistant Professor of Marine Science and Policy Barbara Quimby, Ph.D., co-edited a special issue of Marine Pollution Bulletin, "Resilience and Sustainability of Coastal Communities," and helped write the editorial that frames its 20 peer-reviewed studies for readers around the world.
The editorial opens with a sobering statistic: approximately 2.15 billion people currently live within 100 kilometers of the coast, a number projected to climb to nearly 2.9 billion by 2100. As Quimby and her co-editors lay out, climate change, sea-level rise, and unsustainable development are intensifying pressure on these communities, making resilience — the capacity to prepare for, withstand, and adapt to disruption — one of the defining challenges of the century.
The editors tie that challenge directly to United Nations Sustainable Development Goals on resilient cities, climate action, and ocean conservation, and argue that meeting it requires more than engineering fixes: it calls for sustainable infrastructure, ecosystem-based management, social equity, and participatory governance working together.
The editorial organizes the issue's contributions into four themes: environmental stressors and pollution, climate hazards and ecological resilience, remote sensing and data-driven monitoring, and social-ecological governance and adaptation.
Quimby and her co-editors describe the collection as a demonstration of "the power of cross-disciplinary partnerships and multidisciplinary research approaches" for tackling the complexity of human-environment coastal systems, from estuary pollution to the livelihood strategies of small-scale fishing communities navigating climate change and industrialization.
"Coastal resilience can't be reduced to a single discipline or a single fix," said Quimby. "What this special issue makes clear is that the environmental, social, and governance dimensions of these challenges are deeply intertwined, and that lasting solutions have to engage the communities who depend on these ecosystems, not just the systems themselves."
That emphasis on community engagement runs closest to Quimby's own scholarship. Her research explores the relationships between people and the ocean, with a focus on community-driven natural resource management and coastal fisheries co-management in the Western U.S. and the Pacific, and her current work centers on climate adaptation and "blue" food security and sovereignty in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific Islands. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the joint doctoral program at San Diego State University and UC Santa Barbara, and at HPU she teaches across the Marine Affairs curriculum, including courses on maritime law and ocean policy, marine resource management, and applied GIS.
Quimby co-edited the special issue alongside researchers from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Princeton University. To read the editorial for the special issue, click here.
