Travel along the elbow-shaped bend of North Carolina’s southeastern coast and you’ll come across vibrant fishing communities, charming beach-side tourist destinations, vast fields of corn and soybeans and a plethora of habitats ranging from wetlands and salt marshes to bays, estuaries and maritime forests. This is Carteret County, home to Emerald Isle, Atlantic Beach, Morehead City, Beaufort, Cape Lookout National Seashore and a group of unincorporated tight-knit communities collectively known as “Down East.” The waters surrounding it have long shaped its culture, history and economy. But as climate change hurls stronger storms, chronic floods, warmer temperatures and more at the county, its inhabitants face an uncertain future. For this reason, the Long View Project teamed up with Chris Osburn, director of the Blue Economy Innovation Program, to explore the challenges and opportunities posed by our changing climate over the next two decades or so. To sustain their relationship with water, what new ways of thinking and doing could Carteret County residents adopt?

In this interview, I hopped on a Zoom with Osburn, who is also a marine biogeochemist, Lj Palmer-Moloney, a hydrogeographer and climate educator who has worked on climate preparedness for businesses in the coastal Carolinas, and David Cerino, who directs the Aquaculture Technology program at Carteret Community College. Much of the interview focuses on Down East, where adaptation is particularly challenging and urgent.

Osburn, Palmer-Moloney and Cerino proposed potential – and at times maybe hard to swallow – actions for people to consider. They could retreat, prepare climate-ready business plans, launch infrastructure for a blue economy or install large-scale nature-based solutions like converting salty farms into marshes for aquaculture or recreational fishing. It’s kind of a lot to ask, but there may not be a choice, they told me. A little flexibility may be necessary to actually thrive in this rapidly changing environment, Cerino said, without having to totally abandon traditions. But the adaptation required won’t be simple, they say. It will require a moment of reckoning where folks come together and make a plan. 

This interview was conducted as part of the Long View Project for NC State University’s annual Blue Economy Workshop, led by Chris Osburn, who directs the university’s Blue Economy Innovation Program (BEIP). The aim of the interview was to help identify challenges and opportunities for blue economy innovation in Carteret County, North Carolina. It was edited for clarity. 

JoAnna Klein: I’ve invited each of you to this conversation because of your expertise in marine chemistry, blue economy innovation, hydrology and earth systems. And also because you all have worked closely with communities along the coastal Carolinas to find solutions for resiliency in the face of climate change. With that in mind, what climate-related issues does Carteret County face today, and what challenges do they pose for the near future?

Lj Palmer-Moloney: From an earth systems scientist perspective, the challenges and opportunities kind of coexist, because in chaos is opportunity, right? I see the next five years, 10 years, as becoming more and more chaotic. From a climate systems perspective, the models that we use, and many of the global climate models, cannot keep up with the changes. We need to have the data to put into the models, and everything is accelerating in its presentation, so to speak. I mean, right now everybody knows that we’re going to blow past the 1.5 degree Celsius ceiling to try to keep the climate a little bit cooler, and we’re pushing right on ahead. 

And as we do that, it’s not just atmospheric heat; there’s the thermal expansion of the ocean. It’s just really not rocket science. Hot air holds more moisture. Evaporation accelerates as you have increased heat. That’s happening everywhere. And the ocean is absorbing all of this newly created heat really fast. I think when we think of heat and Carteret County, everybody’s just thinking about sweating in the yard, or it’s too hot to go do this or that. The ocean is also responding. 

I’m not a marine biologist by any stretch of the imagination, but as we have changes in the ocean currents, the slowing down of some of the currents, changes in temperatures, it’s going to affect where the fish are. It’s going to affect the whole marine ecology, the coastal interface, as well as life on the coast. For me, from that bigger earth system science perspective, it’s “hold on to your hat.” We really are in uncharted water, and it’s accelerating. And the agility and flexibility to look at what’s going on and adjust are what’s going to make the challenges and opportunities present themselves. 

In May, a perspectives paper came out in Nature Sustainability on South Louisiana, on New Orleans specifically, about how things are past the turning point. There’s going to be three to seven meters [around nine to 23 feet] of sea level rise coming, and what’s your plan? Part of the article was about how New Orleans is in a terminal state, noting that there’s no amount of money that can keep an island situated below sea level afloat. Alright, so what’s the plan? Is it going to be managed retreat? This was a question posed by a Yale University School of the Environment Professor, Brianna Castro. She asked, what kind of retreat do you want? Is it going to be uncoordinated and chaotic, or is it going to be done with some forethought? 

That’s part of my question that I want to bring to the table: How do we really and honestly work with some of the unknowns? Because we need to have a variety of menu options.

Dave Cerino: Down East, Carteret County, is a very low-lying community. Increased sea levels, saltwater intrusion and flooding impacts are the biggest threats that people are dealing with now, and they are going to increase with time. That, and increased storms, erosion and land loss to the sea are really what we’re looking at as the main threats in the coming years.

JK: Lj mentioned retreat in Louisiana. Dave, do you think that’s definite for Carteret, like it has to be done? 

DC: I think there are ways to use nature-based solutions to harness that flooding and just change our mindset. Certain types of infrastructure may need to move away from where it is. But you can also install nature-based solutions that build land mass or convert areas that are currently farmland (which is becoming less productive due to saltwater intrusion) into marine farms. So kind of embracing that it’s coming, let’s engineer these areas in such a way that you still use some parts for food supply and economic growth, and at the same time create a giant buffer to protect the parts where our infrastructure, homes and businesses are located.

LJPM: It just seems like the disconnect with some of these nature-based solutions, for me, is, alright, think of a bulkhead as opposed to a living shoreline. Put in the living shoreline; it has all of the nature-based solutions, ways to restrict some of the erosion and to encourage sedimentation, and what all. But the bulkhead has a more immediate impact. A lot of times the property owners will put in a bulkhead instead of a living shoreline because they want that immediate result, even though in the long run it’s not going to be the result they’re after. It just takes time for the living shoreline to build. 

I get confused, me personally, about how that can work when we really don’t know how quickly sea level is rising, and, you know, it takes time for all of that to build out. So how do you work with people when you’re discussing a nature-based solution in terms of the anticipated timeline for it?

DC: The challenge is that we have individual properties. Me putting a nature-based solution on my property while neither of my neighbors do doesn’t solve the loss of the shoreline. You can build islands using these nature-based solutions, but most people don’t want to live on an island. We can’t rely on individuals to adopt. We have to create incentives and programs. Basically, people will do it if it makes economic sense. So that is where there needs to be larger, landscape-scale activities versus one-house-at-a-time, because you’re not going to convince those people that have bulkheads that they shouldn’t have a bulkhead.

LJPM: Right. And I think that that’s where, at this moment in time, it can get really frustrating, because a lot of the incentives and the money to do it have been pulled. 

JK: And funding can be complicated, even when it does exist. In order for a local government to get federal funds, for example, to support a project, they basically have to admit there’s a problem. And so if a local government can’t accept that climate change is affecting its people, then even if the money exists, they won’t get it. 

LJPM: JoAnna, are you familiar with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication? They have, over the years, been trying to track these questions. They have a survey that you can do. [It’s the Six Americas Super Short Survey, SASSY.] I’ve used this with small business owners. I’ve used it with my students at Eastern Carolina University. I’ve used it all around. 

There are six different categories into which they put people. They’re trying to tease out where, along this six-category spectrum, you or your community falls. It can go from alarmed, to concerned, to cautious. Most people that have been surveyed over the years fall in those categories. But then you get into people who are disengaged, doubtful, or dismissive, and I think that the dismissive category is the hardest nut to crack. Dismissive is usually tied to short-term economic gain and the decisions to not discuss. 

I think, from work that we’ve been doing in the Charleston, South Carolina area, you can present facts. You can have conversations with people about why changes in the cryosphere make what’s going on in the Carolina coastal zones relevant or how these global connections are so cool to tease out. But dismissives don’t need to be taught. They’re not after facts. They’re in a dismissive space. How we are talking about and working with climate change and climate issues has become very politicized. So in many ways, it’s easier to be dismissive and not go there.

JK: Chris, how do you see Carteret County’s challenges from a biogeochemistry perspective?

Chris Osburn: I don’t think I have a different perspective than Lj or Dave. I have a different flavor of my concerns, and it’s related to some of the pressures that both have mentioned, especially with respect to flooding. I’m a chemist by training, so I think a lot about how ecosystems, both built and natural, are affected by flooding and what comes along with the water. 

With flooding coming from the landward side and from the seaward side, it seems like the coastline in communities like Carteret County, generally, but certainly Down East, is just going to be suffering more and more. You see things like their septic systems getting flooded and overwhelmed, and there’s export of sewage, then, into waters where people want to recreate and fish. But there are also concerns for larger effects that are systemic with warming temperatures, such as warmer water, in general, or the possibility of low oxygen conditions being more severe in different environments.

I think a lot about those ecosystem effects, and where I think innovation needs to happen is: How do you incentivize a community-wide or county-wide “come together moment” (or “get on the same page” or at least “reading the same book”) to try to work on these solutions? Because as Dave was saying, a patchwork of nature-based solutions isn’t going to do the trick. If those communities are fragmented in how they envision something helping their economy, we have this issue of trying to get adoption and acceptance of different technologies and different ways of living at the coast in this dynamic, changing environment. 

DC: So getting those partners on board: You can do large-scale, landscape-scale changes that can benefit the surrounding communities, in my opinion. If you look at what protects most of the communities, it is marshes. But these have been ditched. The “mosquito ditches” carved through these marshes in the past now basically just create a nice little highway for flood waters to come in. That’s kind of low hanging fruit. And some of the land areas used for row crop agriculture are so close to saltwater that they’re starting to become less productive due to saltwater intrusion. You can take those areas that are currently not productive, and convert them [into marshes] to protect the more productive areas.

Those projects are going on. The [North Carolina] Coastal Federation is one large landowner out there. They own a few thousand acres. They’ve been restoring functional wetlands. A lot of the programs that promote and provide incentives to do that just want you to return it to its natural state. That requires nonprofits and donations. And it’s all great. I’m not downplaying it. But in my opinion, it doesn’t have as much impact on the community as converting it with a blue economy mindset, where you can convert that to something that can be profitable and tie into the heritage. 

The reason all those little communities exist along that shoreline is because they’re fishing communities. They each have a community harbor where the fishing boats can tie up. It used to be that a high percentage of the families Down East had a shrimp boat. So you could at least go catch yourself some food or make a little money on the side, or maybe that’s your primary source of income. That has dwindled significantly. It might look a little different with how we approach it, but the need for domestic seafood seems insurmountable at this time, so combining the needs of protecting our land resources and meeting our seafood supply can work together.

LPJM: Two years ago, May 17, 2024, my business was working with a group in Charleston to try to figure out how we could incentivize some of the business owners Down East, especially, but in Morehead City as well. We had a number of different forums that we were calling Blue Economy Business Forums on “Come Hell and High Water.” It was focused on increasing temperature and water levels and trying to get people to realize some of the basic ways that their business was impacted by all this. Like, how can you tailor your supply chain, your inventory, the ways you’re doing business, into this bigger climate stuff? Are your customers able to get to your facility? I mean, if it’s a king tide and people aren’t able to drive down the street or find parking in your area, well, then that might matter. Can your employees get to and from work? Not how do you recover from disaster or plan for the hurricane, but how do you look at the day-to-dayness of some of the issues that Chris was talking about, like compound flooding. 

You can be in some of these places, and it is not a king tide. You park your car, and you get out, and you’re walking around on ground that feels like it’s a sponge. How do you help the business owners realize that there are health risks to you, to your customers, to your employees? 

Over the past year or so, a company running an inland farm in North Carolina has been in legal battles with families of workers who died or were injured from working in the heat. [The company was fined; the fine was reduced in a settlement, and after another worker suffered heat stroke and sued, a judge essentially dismissed the suit.] It is interesting to think about the demographic with the highest number of people going to the emergency room for heat-related illness is men 18 to 64, and they’re primarily doing a lot of outside work. And in Carteret County, they’d be doing landscaping. They’d be doing road work. They’d be doing roofing and construction. It’s not that women are not in these positions, but it’s definitely the guys that are ending up in the emergency room. And the insurability and liability of all of this comes together as well. 

JK: Chris, you mentioned needing a “come together moment,” a place to have big community discussions. Anecdotally, communities tend to come together after a disaster. Do you think that we have to wait for a disaster to come together?

CO: I don’t. I wouldn’t say wait for it, but when disasters happen, these are good opportunities to try to have the uncomfortable conversations and push them forward. I’m not a social scientist, but I think you have to be careful. It’s also a terrible time to be telling people that “well, the reason that you lost your home is because you built a seawall” or something like this. You don’t want to be insulting the people who live there and have gone through this event. 

But it’s also a way to maybe think about increasing acceptance and adoption and education for communities that are impacted. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a storm event, either. Maybe it’s something on a smaller scale. It might not be a catastrophe, but it’s dramatic; it’s something serious for that landowner to consider. Maybe that moment is when someone’s crop fails, or a part of their crop is failing because they’re planting too close to where saltwater intrusion is affecting them. Is that an opportunity to work with them and say, well, okay, maybe it’s not your entire field, but let’s think about where we could get some resources to try to see if you can convert part of this into a more resilient way to continue to farm with different crops and farming methods and other approaches. I think technological innovations are needed, but economic and social innovations are needed as well.

JK: Let’s jump into those innovations. Dave, what have you been up to with aquaculture technology?

DC: For me, the technology innovations are one thing, but, more important, is technology adoption.

A lot of these innovation programs are all about intellectual property (IP). We’ve got to have this IP that can solve all these problems. Then somebody owns it, and someone else can only have it if they buy it. Whereas, there are tremendous amounts of technology that have been developed globally that we’re just not using here because they’re not adopted. And we don’t know how well they’re going to work, because we haven’t tried them and demonstrated their effectiveness or figured out how to improve them and implement them in a widespread manner. 

To me, the innovation is in the mindset of: What existing technologies can we adopt that can solve multiple issues simultaneously? What we call engineered aquatic habitats, which focus on converting these low-lying areas that have saltwater intrusion and flooding issues  to ecologically beneficial habitats, also provide jobs and seafood production.

JK: Help me to better picture this. How might some of these ideas you’re proposing actually look on the ground?

DC: You basically convert a field that is currently not productive into a series of ponds and canals, and you have ways to move water efficiently. You can create water storage capacity, a buffer for flooding, that also can be used for aquaculture ponds for food production and enhancement of wild populations to improve recreational commercial fishing.

CO: I love it, because I hear something like this: Fresh water can be a limiting resource in some of these low-lying areas. But in that system you described, you could also then integrate desalination technology. It’s systems-thinking that is super important. So you have this space where you can bring in some concept like Dave is sharing, and then have others be able to plug into that and add their own value.

“[I]nstead of just trying to apply a band-aid, or a protective wall, against the water, the water is an asset. You know, everybody that doesn’t live on the coast wants to live on the coast, and having too much saltwater is something that we need to figure out how to deal with.”

JK: Now I’m thinking of septic failures during floods. How do you deal with that? With the term “nature-based,” I think of shellfish filtering out pollution. But floods can leak sewage into wetlands, and shellfish soaked in sewage are not safe to eat. So is there some kind of technology that exists now or needs to be invented that could deal with sewage and pollution?

DC: The point is to not let the sewage make it out there. We have a method for dealing with that in communities that have wastewater treatment plants. We weren’t using those pre-1950, and now we do. We no longer dump sewage into our waters. But the infrastructure isn’t there, and for rural communities that are really spread out like that, you have to install things like packaged water treatment plants, or advanced septics that are above ground.

They exist, but they’re expensive. The same technology that’s used for treating the nutrients produced in aquaculture systems is wastewater treatment technology. If you only had a handful of homes to connect to a plant, but that plant could also handle the wastewater from recirculating aquaculture fish production, then you now have enough economic activity to support something like that.

CO: The point about unused existing tech made earlier reminded me of a post I read this morning. It’s called “the missing middle.” In the innovation literature, it’s called the “Tech Valley of Death.” I’m quoting here, it’s “the gap where promising research withers before reaching commercial viability.” Part of the reason for that is protectionist IP that can’t be adopted. There’s this whole licensing benefit, and it seems like something else is needed. After someone goes through an incubator program and comes up with their cool tech, next they may go out and find markets that aren’t necessarily attractive to most investors or venture capitalists. In between, the technology is just sitting somewhere unused. There has to be some way of getting that technology out there that’s beneficial both for the inventor and investor. With these examples we’ve been talking about, I think what’s needed are entities who can promote an invention or innovation and move it beyond just the flashy new idea, towards actually getting into the communities and places it will help.

DC: For situations like that, and for when the primary barrier to industry growth is not adopting an existing aquaculture technology, we need to do commercial scale demonstration – where it’s an investment, maybe it’s a risky investment, because there’s not a model to follow – that is supported by multiple entities. So it’s a public-private partnership that demonstrates these technologies at commercial scale, creates the workforce development programs, the business modeling, financing programs, so that it becomes an opportunity for landowners and businesses to take advantage of. Now that they can see it in their community being successful, people love to copy successful ideas that will make them money. That’s what people do.

LJPM: But to your point about trying to get the communities to work together and to get excited about using some of this technology, it just gets back to, for me, to what degree the community is represented. A lot of times we want to look at the county-level government to maybe be some impetus behind pulling things together. In unincorporated areas that can be a challenge. But I’m thinking about an environmental impact analysis class a few years ago. It was graduate-level students trying to push hard questions. We were on a call with a coastal county in North Carolina that will remain unnamed, and it was not Carteret County. The students had a question for this local government representative about what their plan was for sea level rise. And the response was, we don’t talk about it. We don’t have a plan. 

It’s not dismissive. It’s like an active decision to not engage, not go there. And how many houses collapsed in the past year without a hurricane coming ashore that were over by Buxton? And you’re like, we don’t have a plan? 

It’s all tied up in this very interconnected bundle for me. We can get to those higher level technologies, and we can get to innovation. But we’ve got to have excitement to put behind it. And we’ve got to have this energy to go, yeah, we really are looking for something like that. But that implies you recognize a problem or you’re trying to work toward a solution, and that’s where I get really frustrated sometimes.

DC: So while these communities may not have a plan to deal with sea level rise, they most likely do have a plan for economic development. That is where you have to focus it. If those collapsing homes were rental properties that were getting $5,000 a week in the summer or something, then that’s something economically driven that you can protect. 

But on the other side, what are the ways that we can promote the things that I’ve been talking about? You just don’t approach it by trying to convince someone that climate change is real and sea level rise is happening, and that they should plan ahead. You just say, if you want to make money using the resources that you have, here’s an opportunity.

LJPM: Economic development and environmental issues, they are joined at the hip, especially on the coast. It’s curious. I just appreciate those thoughts about the technology and the economic development side of it. 

CO: ​​I’ve been interacting with these communities far less than Dave or Lj, but one thing that strikes me is how tied they are to their heritage, and their resilience almost comes from just being like, well, this is kind of what happens now, and we’re dealing with it, and this is kind of how we’re thinking about the future. We will just have these events, these storms, this change, and then that’s it. I don’t know. Making that economic case, it seems like a no-brainer. 

LJPM: Well, at the very beginning of our talk, I was identifying with South Louisiana, where I’m from. I had to not bring up my Army Corps of Engineers background when I went home, because after Katrina, it wasn’t very popular to work with the Corps of Engineers for a while. 

But that idea of being resilient, I always think of people digging in their heels. Well, in South Louisiana, the land to dig your heels on is vanishing. It’s gone. So you can keep insisting that we’re going to be resilient and everything else. They are absolutely losing the land on which they want to do that. And they go, well, we’ve got a boat. Okay, but you can’t get anywhere. You’re becoming more and more isolated, and it’s becoming more and more of a struggle. 

South Louisiana is definitely different than coastal North Carolina, but this sense of heritage, this sense of this is the way we’ve always done it, and we will figure it out? They can’t do it that way anymore in so many places in South Louisiana because communities have no options left. You look at Plaquemines Parish, the little end of Louisiana. If you look at an old map, when the river looks like it went all the way down to this crow’s foot delta into the Gulf, and you look at the actual aerial, you look at any satellite image of South Louisiana now, and it’s just, it’s literally gone. So, whatcha gonna do?

DC: We are approaching, with some issues, the point of just complete and utter frustration and despair, which is maybe a necessary sort of rock bottom to lead people towards other options. I mean, I’d say, the commercial fishing industry, in its relation to the aquaculture industry, has reached that. It used to be, they saw it as competition and pretty much opposed it, and now, more and more commercial fishermen are doing oysters, at least on the side, or as their primary source of income, and see it as a way to stay on the water in the seafood industry. And look at domestic seafood versus imported seafood as the main challenge to overcome. I think that in a lot of the worst-case scenarios that we’re seeing currently, people are getting to that point of, like, oh, we have to do something. If I can only fish for flounder for two days out of the year, we’ve gotta do something. Those kinds of things are just getting people to the point of being ready to try something that maybe they wouldn’t have 20 years ago.

LJPM: There is climate scientist, Katharine Hayhoe. She wrote this beautiful book called Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. When you mentioned the frustration and despair, one of the things that she has done a ton of research on and is totally focused on, is the importance of talking about it. Talking about it even provides an action that can lead people out of some of this despair. The mental health community is doing a whole lot of stuff with climate and trying to figure out how mentally we work with that. 

The Climate Awareness Engagement Academy that I’m working on with The Citadel down in Charleston, has been absolutely laser focused on how to bring people together who are small business owners. How do we give them some of the high points of what exactly is going on in the earth system, and the atmosphere and everything? What is behind some of this weather weirding or climate change? It’s not to proselytize. The people who participate in our academy already are cautious and concerned about what’s going on with the climate. They’re not in that dismissive group. 

We have had some absolutely exciting and invigorating engagement with the small business community, and I think it’s that flexibility and agility that the blue economy innovators, Chris, could be working with. How do we not be dismissive of it or act like it isn’t there? How can we leverage this to make our businesses present as climate-aware and future-focused to draw new customers who want that awareness and understanding? It’s like, let’s turn this into more of a positive thing that could be used for generating or setting businesses apart, to go, we know what’s going on, and we’re responding to it, and we’re acting on it. 

JK: Is there a way that you could do both? I’ve seen at least one story in the local North Carolina publications about, “climate change by any other name.” Does it matter if it’s working if we don’t say “climate”? I see your point, Lj. For the future, there is already a whole group of people who want to know that a product or service is sustainable and climate-friendly. But also right now, some may be more likely to adopt a technology or idea related to climate change just by hearing it a different way. I don’t know what it would be. 

LJPM: I listened to a Gen Z focus group discussing some of their angst about the environment, but it was more couched in the economy and their opportunities. They’re starved for finding places like this right now. They’re not needing to wait. I think it’s the Boomer generation or some of the Gen X-y kind of space that maybe feels a little bit more hesitant. I think the younger people are just sort of like, would you quit not talking about it? We just need to address it. So I would push back on that. I would say, call it by what it is, unless you’re in one of these predicaments where funding is withheld if you use certain words in a proposal. 

CO: I think that’s a really realistic and sustaining way of thinking about that. You’re doing good work, and it’s having an impact. Maybe you have to be flexible with the words you use so long as you’re getting the work done, the communities are benefiting, and people are making money. That flexibility allows us to reach these goals. 

When you first posed the question, JoAnna, I thought of the “Got to be NC” campaign. It’s a huge one for NC agriculture. How can you adapt it for locally sourced seafood and make that local connection? That is a great way of building a resilient, sustainable future. And in doing so, a coastal focus addresses some of these points, even if it’s not like “Got to be Better Climate NC,” for example. You know, you’re meeting the goals and objectives, but you’re doing it in a way that is playing on that stronger connection of place that folks have, connecting to their heritage and to what they want, just using different words. 

JK: And maybe it could be a tiered thing. Like maybe right now, you avoid the word and then bring it in later. But if you avoid the word forever, then you’re going to have the same problem, over and over and over, and nobody thinks about it. So, you’d have to bring the climate language back in when Gen Z becomes the main adopters. 

CO: Tiered is a good way of thinking about it, but fluid too. The conversation will change depending on who’s in the conversation and where they are. You meet people where they are. The thread that ties it together, in this example, is that “Got to be NC.” It creates that focus, but so much that plays into it connects to climate. So when the time is right, or you’re in that space where you can have the conversation, you can then do it. 

JK: I think that’s also kind of a common ground that isn’t politicized, right? Like people who have lived in a place for a really long time love the land. 

CO: Love the water. 

JK: On the other hand, Lj, can you speak more on what you’ve found working with the Climate Awareness Engagement Academy?

LJPM: It is easier to work in areas where there is a higher population density, and where a lot of the people from whom you might be trying to draw a pool of participants don’t seem to have as much resistance. I will get back to the idea of the political. For a lot of reasons, it’s disturbing, the way that people are tying together their political views with what we’re trying to achieve to help the economy succeed in Eastern North Carolina. 

It was just a whole lot easier to get things off the ground and accepted and going in South Carolina, in Charleston County. We had a lot of response. We were struggling with whether or not to try to find different sectors. Like, do we want to have something for construction workers? Do we want to have something more for the farmer, agricultural communities, for the tourist industry? But we decided to blend it all together, and I think that was a good move, because people are too stovepiped, and they needed to see this overlap. That was a very effective strategy. 

I believe in January, we have another academy set up to work specifically with the local government and town of Mount Pleasant, again in the Charleston area, but more of a suburb, and with one of the Gullah Geechee communities. They are also very culturally vested in the place where they are, and they are very openly talking about how they’re going to need to relocate: What is this like, and when do we do it, and how do we do it? It’s just a very different vibe there.

And the final thing I want to point out, just in terms of the academy, is that we are looking for funding outside of the federal government, because we want to offer different levels of the academy. For example, we’re on climate awareness right now because that’s what our federal funding would allow, and I think we want to move to action. You go from being a climate aware business to having a level of the academy working on climate action. 

We have put together a really, I think, awesome tool. It’s a climate action plan that is designed to help businesses, not plan for disaster, but create a streamlined plan to safeguard their business during regular operations, and how to look at their financial assets in terms of the increasing storm frequency, flooding, extreme heat, and all that, just to have it as part of the business plan, not to have it as a response to a disaster. I think that’ll be a really neat way to move to that second level for our climate action. 

Earlier this summer, the UN came out and said we want to add climate accountability to what we’re asking for. I can envision taking this climate academy, going from awareness to action to accountability. How we define that remains to be seen, but it’s been invigorating. It’s been exciting. I’m cautiously optimistic that we could get this going in Eastern North Carolina, but it was easier to get our proof of concept going in a different place. 

JK: Dave, if your vision for Carteret County succeeds, what does the county look like in 5, 10, or 20 years?

DC: Well, it’s still there. The communities are able to remain where they are and retain, or even increase, the amount of blue economy businesses in seafood production, environmental restoration and all these different things working together.

Again, instead of just trying to apply a band-aid, or a protective wall, against the water, the water is an asset. You know, everybody that doesn’t live on the coast wants to live on the coast, and having too much saltwater is something that we need to figure out how to deal with. 

JK: Say somebody Down East, their grandchild is actually really open to change and excited about the possibility. Maybe they have fishing skills passed down from family that could be useful in aquaculture. What do you imagine them doing in the near future? 

DC: There’s a bunch of different ways that you can approach this. If it’s a commercial fishing background, and they want to continue commercial fishing in more traditional ways, these engineered aquatic habitats have the ability to create private fisheries. We can soften the clash between recreational and commercial. So, the other type of land that’s out here besides agricultural land is hunting clubs. You could create private fisheries in those habitats as well. You can create sites that are privately owned where people can have their own fish that the recreational people can’t touch, or their own fish that the commercial people can’t touch. And they can manage it in the way that they want to for the type of activities that they want. 

Once you know how to do all these things – like bringing in high-value species that are beneficial for commercial/recreational fishing or nutrient-extractive seaweeds and algae that are potentially feeding into the biotech industry – and figure out how to make those all work together (and technology, modeling and AI are all involved in figuring out how to do that), we can open up those [engineered aquatic habitats ] for customization based on a person’s particular interest, or a community, or landowner, or family.

About the interviewees

Chris Osburn is a Professor of Marine Biogeochemistry and Director of the Blue Economy Innovation Program at NC State University.

Laura Jean (“Lj”) Palmer-Moloney is the Founder and Lead Consultant with Visual Teaching Technologies. In this role, she worked on the Climate Awareness Engagement Academy, a project designed to help small businesses plan for resilient futures. She is also a hydrogeographer and Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Earth Environment and Planning at East Carolina University.

David Cerino is the Director of Aquaculture Technology at Carteret Community College. He also helps support the NC East Alliance, especially with blue economy initiatives.