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 > Internet
INTERNET
Telecommunications infrastructure includes telephone, television, radio, distribution and maintenance buildings, antennae, and fiber optic cables. Several of these cables are submarine cables laid over the ocean floor. 1 These systems are especially critical to connect remote and rural areas in the Gulf of Maine and provide digital equity, or access to the “necessary information technology resources to participate in society, democracy, and the economy fully.” 2
Telecommunications infrastructure is vulnerable to wind loading, as well as coastal and inland flooding at support facilities, and increasing high temperature days that affect electronics. Telecommunications systems are critically dependent on electrical power and transportation access. 3
The availability and access of these systems illustrate ongoing inequities between rural and urban areas.
1 While the first submarine cables carried telegraphic traffic, the network has expanded to transmit data, voice transfers, and power transmission. See “Submarine Cables,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, March 5, 2024, www.noaa.gov/submarine-cables.
2 Digital equity includes not only access to devices and the internet, but also the ability to participate, necessitating digital literacy training. “What is digital equity?” Internet Society Foundation, June 2023, accessed June 25, 2025, www.isocfoundation.org/2023/06/what-is-digital-equity.
3 United States Department of Homeland Security, “Casco Bay Region Climate Change Resiliency Assessment” (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Homeland Security, 2016):2, https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1192&context=cbep-publications.