When Dr. Mark Borrelli, a former coastal geologist for Center for Coastal Studies and a researcher at UMass Boston, started his presentation, “Coastal Geology and the Science of Storms, Sediment Transport, and Coastal Evolution on Martha’s Vineyard,” as part of the 2026 Martha’s Vineyard Coastal Conference on Tuesday, he provided a list of take-home messages to attendees.
“The waves will not stop. Coastal erosion will never stop. Storms … should I keep going, or can I just stop here? It’s going to be persistent. It’s going to keep on going. What’s happening now will continue. With sea level rise, storms will get worse. Erosion will change. It’s going to get better in places. It’s going to get worse in other places. But this is a very, very well-understood premise,” Borrelli said.
What may be a well-understood premise for scientists is also one that felt unsettling. We all saw the Island inundated a few weeks ago by an early-season nor’easter; the land appeared to give way to the ocean at Five Corners, Safe Harbor Vineyard Haven, and Dock Street in Edgartown. The fact that Martha’s Vineyard is an Island, surrounded by often tempestuous waters, suddenly felt all too real. What does Borrelli mean, “It’s going to get worse?”
Global average sea level has risen eight to nine inches since 1880, due to both meltwater from glaciers and ice sheets as well as thermal expansion of seawater as temperatures rise, and the rate of sea level rise is only accelerating. That’s pretty apparent on the Island, and there seem to be fewer and fewer efforts to stop that train.
Over the summer, I spoke to Ewell Hopkins, president of the Vineyard Conservation Society, for my story “How much more can the Island handle?” (July 9.) He told me that people should learn how to modify their behavior, like utilizing the free Vineyard Transit Authority buses rather than personal cars to lessen individual carbon emissions, so that municipal systems don’t need to build to meet peak requirements. And I wondered, when did the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fade away?
The truth is that those efforts aren’t gone. When I spoke to scientists at the Stone Living Lab in Boston about a newly installed flood sensor in Oak Bluffs, they said that the focus has just stretched to include, and perhaps prioritize, climate adaptation.
And as I listened to talk after talk Tuesday at the M.V. Film Center for the annual coastal conference, that trend in the face of climate change (and sea level rise and coastal erosion and …) began to appear. There was a definitive sense of acceptance by presenters and those in the audience: It really is going to get worse. Simultaneously, there was an absolute understanding that the world, and especially the Island, needs to adapt to a new reality.
Dr. Farshid Vahedifard, professor of civil and engineering at Tufts University, discussed a tribal-led project for the Aquinnah Cliffs that may include, after more research, nature-based adaptations against coastal erosion. Sakiko Isomichi, climate resilience planner for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, recently worked on a study about the Island’s interconnected but fragile supply chain, which is threatened by increasingly unpredictable and severe weather — adaptation projects and diversification of mainland ports are on the table to help that vulnerability. She also recently secured a grant from the state to consider alternatives for Beach Road, which connects the ferry terminal and the hospital in Vineyard Haven, as the town of Tisbury, MassDOT, and the MVC look to redesign the outfall system that floods Five Corners.
Other efforts and initiatives — from the Martha’s Vineyard Island-Wide Emergency Management and Response Coordination Strategic Integration and Implementation Plan to studies to identify the cause of depleted herring runs, to salt marsh restoration projects on Chappaquiddick — were discussed Tuesday. And they all had one thing in common: adaptation.
It might be pessimistic of me to think that people won’t modify their behavior. Did every New Yorker, during the Fourth of July heat wave, turn their heat up to 78° after New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked them to use less energy? Probably not, because we can’t even get everyone on the Island to take the bus.
Climate adaptation projects are great, but they very much feel like a Plan B, and I can only hope that they make as much of an impact as planned. And the truth is, simultaneously, we should all try to mitigate our individual footprints. We need both.
Hayley Duffy is an environment reporter and managing editor of The Times.
