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 > Public Health
PUBLIC HEALTH
The public health system on the Gulf of Maine includes hospitals, mental hospitals, medical buildings, pharmacies, and infirmaries. These facilities are critical in providing care to a warming Gulf of Maine with an increasing number of extreme heat events, higher pollen concentrations, decreasing summer air quality due to wildfire smoke, more prevalent vector-borne diseases, and water-related illnesses due to increased soil erosion, agricultural runoff, and pesticide usage. 1 These changes threaten to exacerbate existing inequalities in the Gulf’s healthcare systems.
Healthcare access, quality, and affordability vary dramatically across the Gulf’s geography. At a national level, Canada provides single-payer universal healthcare, while the United States has a mixed system in which care is largely provided by private sector facilities. Yet rural places in both countries face similar challenges.
While there are 25 hospitals and 20 community health centers in the Boston area, there is limited access to basic medical and specialist care in rural areas, islands, and interior Maine, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. On islands without roads connecting to the mainland, ferries and planes are required to bring patients to routine doctor’s appointments and emergency services. The healthcare system in the Gulf of Maine is therefore dependent on functional roads, ferry piers, and airports in the event of emergency, as well as reliable electricity and telecommunications systems. These interdependencies require a holistic understanding of infrastructural vulnerabilities and how they will be exacerbated by the climate crisis.
1 Each region will experience climate change and health impacts differently. See “Regional Health Effects - Northeast,” United States Center for Disease Control, June 3, 2024, www.cdc.gov/climate-health/php/regions/northeast.html.