The Gulf of Maine is an international watershed in the North Atlantic stretching north from Provincetown at the tip of Massachusetts Bay in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to Cape Sable on the Bay of Fundy in the province of Nova Scotia in Canada. For over 13,000 years, the Gulf has been developed around access to the coast for fishing, trading, and recreation. Today, these coastal development patterns put the cultural landscapes, economies, communities, and aging infrastructure systems along the Gulf at risk.
Climate Futures on the Gulf of Maine uses place-based scenario planning to illustrate the risks, vulnerabilities, and plausible futures for ten infrastructure systems along the rim of the Gulf. Place-based scenario planning is a method of long-term strategic planning that creates representations of multiple, plausible futures that are used to inform decision-making in the present. While complementary to probabilistic models used to forecast future vulnerabilities, scenario-based planning shifts emphasis from statistical probability to ways of thinking about the future. The goal of place-based scenario planning is not to predict the most likely outcome, but to reveal biases and blind spots in complex and non-linear situations.
Climate Futures uses the medium of landscape representation to surface the cultural value systems embedded in existing infrastructural systems, and position landscape as a driver when evaluating design from individual infrastructures to the Gulf of Maine watershed.
Systems > Air
AIR
Air travel connects the remote islands and inland areas of the Gulf of Maine region. There are 392 airports on the Gulf of Maine, ranging from primary publicly owned airports that provide international commercial service to basic privately owned gravel airstrips that link rural communities with the national airport system and provide emergency response services and support personal flying. 1
The busiest airport, Boston Logan Airport, serves almost 20 million customers per year and using three runways to take off and land 120 aircraft per hour during ideal weather conditions. Some airports, like the privately owned gravel runway at Matinicus Island Airport on Matinicus Isle, the outermost inhabited island in Maine, may land one propeller plane per week and serve relatively few customers, but provide a critical link to the mainland. 2 Other airports, like Provincetown Municipal Airport, provide a less essential function, serving to shuttle passengers from Boston only during the summer tourist season.
Regardless of airport size, all airports have environmental impacts, including noise, air quality within the relative vicinity of airports, water and soil pollution, particularly from fuel, waste, and significant greenhouse gas emissions. Air travel also creates logical interdependencies with other infrastructure systems: the high carbon cost of air travel compared to other forms of transportation exacerbates climate impacts like sea level rise, which put low-lying roads, treatment plants, and airports themselves at increasingly greater risk. 3 4
1 U.S. Department of Transportation, “Aviation Facilities,” Shapefile (National Transportation Atlas Database, June 12, 2025).
2 On Matinicus, air operations bring essential supplies that supplement goods delivered on the bi-monthly ferry service. Philip W. Conkling, Islands in Time: A Natural and Cultural History of the Islands of Maine, 3rd ed. (Rockland, ME: Island Institute, 2011), 224.
3 Airports constructed along the rim of the Gulf of Maine near sea level and over historic tidelands and wetlands, most critically Boston Logan Airport, built just 19.1’ above sea level, are increasingly at risk of flooding, which can contaminate groundwater supplies.
4 Candelaria Bergero et al., “Pathways to Net-Zero Emissions from Aviation,” Nature Sustainability 6 (2023): 404–14.