- [Narrator] Funding provided by Connecticut Green Bank and the Nature Conservancy in Connecticut.

(calm music plays) (splashing water) (calm music plays) - [Ian] It was a thriving fishery, once upon a time, until about 1999, the population crashed.

So what once supported almost 100 commercial lobstermen, I think we're down to under 10 now.

So we are from the Thames River today, trying to grapple up as many of these ghost pots as they're called, or derelict lobster traps, as possible.

This is '01, this is 2002.

This is '03.

This is the most recent one, this white one.

(indistinct) - So what we've found over time, about 50 years, is our long-term data set now.

We're seeing increased pH levels.

We're also seeing increased temperatures.

So water is warming here, and we're seeing shifts in species populations.

So the colder water creatures, we're seeing their numbers on the decline.

While the organisms that prefer warmer water, we're tending to see their numbers increase.

- [Ian] When you say that the temperature of Long Island Sound has increased by two degrees Celsius, it doesn't sound like a lot, you know, over 20 years, but biologically speaking, that is very significant.

Lobsters were already at the southern ends of their range in Long Island Sound, New Jersey.

So if, you gotta figure, they're probably already in waters that were about as warm as they can tolerate.

So a couple degrees is all it can take to cause them to not thrive, not be successful here.

The die off was an abrupt event.

However, the fact that more of them aren't coming in must mean that something about this environment isn't suitable for them anymore.

(music continues) (dramatic string music begins) - I grew up in Connecticut in the 1970s.

I was born in the late 1960s, and Connecticut in the '70s was still a fairly... ...there was a lot more farms, there was a lot more woods.

There was a, it was a pretty interesting time.

I was very little when I first went to Long Island Sound.

I probably don't even remember the first time.

I do remember going to my grandmother's house one time over on Long Island when, I don't know, I was maybe two or three.

It was my first starfish.

So I, that's always been burned in my memory.

This little tiny starfish as a kid just filled me with wonder.

Once you start dancing with nature as a little kid, you understand the subtleties and the messages that are out there.

The absolute wonder that all these systems are occurring, all these nutrient cycles, all these life cycles.

And there's boundless numbers of them going on right underneath us now.

So I think it's just an awe.

And so, even in an urban sea like we have now, there's still a lot going on.

There's a lot of mystique and a lot of natural dances happening.

Long Island Sound's not that old.

You know, maybe 12,000 years ago it was a lake and then it blew out into the ocean and now we have Long Island Sound.

So it's relatively young geologically and it's flat and it has a little notch at the end, but it's pretty shallow body water for salt water.

So what that does is it warms up and creates all these currents and cycles and it has a lot of bays and harbors.

There's over a hundred little nooks and crannies.

And so those are all places where the nutrients and the rivers are mixing.

And what that does is create an incredible productivity.

- [Jim] This is an interesting geological area, right, in Connecticut.

And the area between Watch Hill and the North fork of Long Island was sort of a rocky dam.

Rivers that were draining from these glaciers formed deltas where they went into the lake.

But then when sea level dropped, when this dam at Montauk and Watch Hill gave up, the Sound dropped and exposed these plains to the air.

And so they grew trees and animals lived there, people lived there.

And then sea level has been rising since then.

Fairfield and New Haven and some parts of Bridgeport and little parts of Groton too are built on these plains because they were attractive places for colonists to come.

They were near the ocean where they could get to ships.

They were, freshwater was nearby.

It was arable land, right?

And not too hilly.

So that's why the towns are where they are.

I think it's because of the geological structures that were created 10,000 years ago.

And then roads grew between communities, right?

And they tended to go along the shoreline because they, to avoid going over hills.

(calm music returns) - [Michael] Colonization started with the shoreline and worked its way inland and the reason for that primarily is because of water.

When we do archeological surveys, you know, and we find remnants of old indigenous villages, they're usually close by water sources.

My name is Michael Kickingbear Johnson.

I'm the current Acting Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for my tribe, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe located here in Connecticut.

Well, the tribe has been here since time immemorial.

So this has always been our place, where we have always lived and, you know, Connecticut in terms of that name grew up around us, right?

This reservation actually isn't our complete territory.

We actually lived all along, both the Connecticut shoreline as well as part of southern Rhode Island, starting from the shoreline, and then over colonization pushed us back inland to really where we are today.

So it's, we had well over at least 10,000 citizens at one point during our past history.

So if you figure before glaciation, right, the shoreline that we know today was actually out farther by somewhere towards 200 miles in some estimates.

And so we know that we had encampments, our village sites were out well beyond actually the area occupied by the waters of Long Island.

So if you think even farther out than that, we know to have had sites out there where we've lived.

And when the oceans were formed because of glacier melt, pushing our people back toward, you know, the shore line that we know today.

We used those waters for travel back and forth between, you know, different points, our reservations.

We used it for trade 'cause there was actually early trade before the creation of the United States itself, with European explorers and things of that nature.

But also travel between ourselves.

Trade between their tribes occurred using those waters, going from one location to a, let's say, another hunting ground, right?

Or even fishing as well.

Freshwater to saltwater.

You know, all of this was used in our history.

(waves crashing) - [Bill] Long Island Sound in its pristine form was probably one of the most biologically productive places on the planet.

We beat the hell out of it for a long time.

We've really polluted it, but there's been a lot of work to clean it up and we're starting to see some of that abundance.

So two years ago, the entire Sound was full from the Bronx to Little Narraganset Bay with Manhattan.

That's amazing.

That's an incredible amount of biomass.

And so that sets up the stage for restoring the whole system from top to bottom.

Climate change is a big one for Long Island Sound.

It's a shallow body of water, so it can get pretty hot.

I heard this summer for the first time over in the Great South Bay in Long Island, it hit 80 degrees.

This is Fahrenheit, that's hot.

That's hot.

So when you have life in the Sound that's used to a certain temperature regime, when you start bumping those numbers up, you're gonna start losing parts of that life cycle.

- [Jim] It's pretty straightforward.

CO2, carbon dioxide emissions from human activity have added CO2 to the atmosphere over the last 100 years or so.

And when CO2 gets in the atmosphere, it tends to make it warmer near the ground.

The consequence of warming of the water expands.

Water just gets deeper when it gets warmer.

At 2100, the upper bound of what's likely for mean sea level change in Connecticut is maybe around 2.1 meters, nearly seven feet, right?

The lower band is more like 50 centimeters, which is about two feet.

And it turns out that Connecticut is going to, water levels here are going to rise more quickly than almost everywhere else in the world.

(boat motor running) - [Norm] It's kinda like a rake, you know, you're almost raking leaves off the lawn and the design is to leave the bottom.

You know, if I damage the bottom, I can't put oysters back.

I guess keeping these, our oyster beds, I guess cultivate and work in them.

It's not silted over where it's smothered and the bottom like almost becomes dead, you know, it gets like a cloud of mud on it where nothing lives.

So by us doing this and the oysters feeding and pumping, there's a lot of other fish, other animals live on these beds.

It really helps keep the water out here even healthier.

(piano music begins) If you come out here after a storm sometimes, you know, them hurricanes we've had, you see these dredges coming up like this.

You come out, you'd be lucky to put a little bit of oysters in the bottom and it'll look like it's been on a beach where it's got polished.

All the shells would be white and it's just a hollow sound and everything died.

Irene, we got all that rain.

Vermont, 20 inches of rain.

all these rivers flooded.

This whole Sound was like brown right after it.

Then when Sandy came, Sandy was just pure ocean water.

What we're doing now is, like I say, Copps Islands are a traditionally farmed product.

We are looking into more of the hatchery side of it, you know, which we think it's a good add, it's a good help.

You know, 'cause after going through those hurricanes, it takes us a long time to start up 'cause it's a three year crop.

So if we come out here and we get wiped out, you know, or pushed way down where we lose a huge percent of our crop, well now we have to start building again.

So, you know, it takes three years.

So we figure we can get these hatcheries going, we're gonna keep product coming out here a lot faster.

Well, to me, what's special about Long Island Sound, the Connecticut side, one thing is the amount of rivers that dump into it that bring the nutrients and the food into this part of the Sound.

And we get a lot of flushing.

You know, we got six, eight foot tides, so it's constantly flushing.

So it's a perfect thing for breeding oysters, you know?

And as long as you respect the resource and you manage it right, and you work it right, you'll keep getting rewards from it.

But water quality's everything.

I mean, if we lose our water, we lose our rivers, we got no food out here in the water, then we're not growing oysters.

(inquisitive music plays) - [Peter] We are at Lyon Park right now, Port Chester, and our community scientists are arriving now, signing out sample bottles that they're gonna take to various locations and rivers along the Long Island Sound shoreline, public beaches, to collect samples for pathogen indicator bacteria.

- A little wet from the rain.

- [Elena] Often people have no idea that, you know, maybe nearby there's a pipe or an outfall that is spewing out sewage.

And we're hoping to catch that and then report that out both publicly so people are aware and they can take whatever safety measures they need to, to avoid interacting with that waterway in the meantime, until we can figure out how to stop that.

I think the biggest issues in Connecticut are, you know, cracked pipes, pipes that are just getting really old and really do need to be replaced or upgraded.

And if you have these huge rain events, it's just gonna put more pressure on these pipes that are really just degraded and that can be impacted by something like climate change.

When you have bigger storms, more frequently, more volume of precipitation, whether that's snow and huge melts or hurricane and huge amounts of rain, that's when CSO events occur.

And what that means is you have your storm water sewer system and then you have your sewer system.

So all the sewage, you know, people washing their dishes, flushing the toilets, usually both the storm water going in those, you know, catch basins and storm drains that you see, they combine and then they go to a water treatment plant to get processed before then going back out into our waterway, which is great until you get a huge, huge rain event or huge snow melt.

And then at that point, the water treatment plant nor the pipes can handle the volume of water.

And then all of that combined is just gonna go straight out into the harbors and bays and streams untreated.

(piano music plays) - [Macho] I love fishing and I do it as a sport, but I do it to feed my family too.

I put 'em in a deep freezer in the wintertime we got fish.

I'm always going to put food on my people table.

That's what I gotta do.

I gotta support eight kids and a wife.

The water is dirty, the water is dirty, but we got no choice.

That's how we feed our families.

It don't matter What we do in life is gonna be a negative and a positive, but the water pollution is bad, the air pollution is bad.

But what can we do?

We still gotta live.

We still gotta live.

- The people who cause climate change the least are the ones who are most affected by climate change.

We're located at PT Barnum Housing Complex in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

PT Barnum is in the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time.

It is centrally located in some of the most hazardous environments in Connecticut.

It's very close to the I95 interstate.

It is close to a Wheelabrator incinerator It's downwind from PSEG, formally PSEG's coal fire power plant.

Now the natural gas plant, it's within proximity to rock crushing facilities, porta potty cleaning facilities.

It even has the sewage sludge plant.

So they're bombarded with all types of emissions, bad air pollution that adversely affect their health and wellbeing.

When it comes to asthma deaths and hospitalizations, Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport are neck and neck.

It depends on what year you look at the statistics.

- [Mark] Most of the environmental problems that we see in communities of color are made worse by climate change.

Connecticut has the highest air pollution of any state east of the Mississippi, and that's because of the prevailing wind patterns.

The wind from the south blows up the Atlantic Ocean towards Connecticut, and the wind from the west blows in from the Ohio Valley.

And so both of those currents tend to meet in Connecticut.

And as we see global warming and more heat, we get more ozone.

What does ozone do?

It contributes to the high rates of air pollution, increases the asthma in Connecticut.

In white communities, when we talk about climate change, people see it as an existential threat.

In communities of color, we see it as just one more existential threat.

- [Sharon] People die due to heat waves in droves.

And yet there's so many people who don't have air conditioning, don't have fans, there's no tree canopy where they live, and it's just a horrible situation.

We recently had a heat wave and people were calling us, begging us for some way to get to a cooling center.

Cooling centers are overcrowded, but more importantly, they're not planned with the people who are going to be there in mind.

I'm concerned that there's no representation at the decision making tables for those most impacted by the vagueries of the weather.

Those most impacted by extreme heat, those most impacted by extreme cold, most impacted by floods.

We're very, very concerned because without having a place at the table, the people who are most impacted are always left behind and not able to recover from these disastrous health conditions.

Connecticut is one of the lowest states in the union where the average elevation is only 500 feet above sea level.

So you can just imagine a super storm would put Bridgeport, Connecticut underwater.

(slow music plays) - [Linda] When it floods, the water in this area comes up very high.

It goes almost up to my garage.

If it's raining real, real bad, the water will come up to my shins.

I've lived in Stratford all my life, actually.

At the time that I purchased this residence, I was not told it was a flood area at all.

As a matter of fact, the person whom I purchased it from said they never had a flood.

And I find that ironic because two years in, I had a flood and I had to get rid of everything in the basement.

I'm always concerned when I know it's gonna rain.

And especially if they say storm and steady rain, because it means that again, if my son is working, I have to go get his car, bring it home, put it in the garage because his car is not gonna make it.

If I get the opportunity, I'm outta here.

Oh, yes.

And I wouldn't advise anybody to move in this side of Stratford.

I mean, I like this side of Stratford.

It's nice, it's calm.

The people are great, the schools in this area are good.

But when it comes to the residents of this area and the town caring about us, no, no.

- [Stephanie] The darker the colors, darker the red is the more extreme cases of flooding.

This is my house right here, okay?

And I'm one of, actually, I'm one of the darker orange to darker red on my block.

Here are some of the people who are dark red, which means that if there's even a minimal amount of rain, they flood in some capacity, their street, their basement, or even more so.

This problem affects a neighborhood.

It's called the South End of Stratford.

It's about 20 square blocks of homes, even though we have a flooding issue all over Stratford, this flooding issue is a little different than some of the other flooding issues that are presented around the rest of the town.

And because it's a densely populated area, the cost rises exponentially.

It takes a lot of money to fix a flooding problem like this.

It's millions of dollars, millions, and you've gotta do a lot of work to get a lot of people involved.

But we can't give up because it costs us a lot of money.

Every time we give up, there's a flood that happens, somebody's basement gets completely damaged.

That's three or $4,000 of repairs.

FEMA is raising our flood insurance every time we look around.

A flood insurance right now is four and $5,000.

Most people can't afford that.

It's preventing people from moving into the neighborhoods.

Our streets are impassable, which means that if there's an emergency event, ambulances, firemen can't get into the neighborhood.

The options only get worse.

We all know by all the studies that the area is gonna be underwater if we don't do something to address it.

Flooding isn't a political issue, it's not a partisan issue.

And people have to stop thinking about this in terms of Republican and Democrat.

These are homes, they don't care.

Water doesn't care what party you're affiliated with, water wants to go where water goes.

- [Syma] So we're here at Jupiter Point in Groton, and this is my mom's house.

My grandfather built this in 1938, right after the '38 hurricane.

You know, when I was a kid, this neighborhood was kind of, you know, like a working class waterfront community.

And, you know, it's really kind of been built up quite a bit in the last 20 years.

I think a lot of the houses, you know, around here were just simple houses built on pilings or stilts.

Here you can kind of get a glimpse of the shack that was my great-grandmother's and she used it for clam digging.

And you know when what I've heard is when we'd have a hurricane, it would float away and then you'd, they'd go tow it right back and put it back on its pilings.

Now it's actually an Airbnb.

At high tide most days, this end of the point is actually covered in water.

It actually, if we walked out there, you'll see there's, you know, there's no dry ground at high tide anymore.

And as a kid, I remember only in the biggest storms would this be inundated.

And it was always really exciting.

We'd come down and go barefoot.

It was something very exciting about being in land that was inundated.

But now unfortunately, it happens almost on a daily basis.

It's those big catastrophic events that are gonna, you know, see whether living on the coast is a sustainable endeavor.

Like, I don't know the answer to the future of this community.

I mean, I hope it's here, but, you know, we're lucky in Long Island Sound.

We're protected by Long Island.

We don't get the huge ocean waves.

But, you know, I've seen some pretty big waves around here.

Kind of now with our building codes of going up in the air 14 feet or whatever the new elevation is.

You know, you're just investing as much in a foundation as you do in the house.

So the whole cost that's invested in a lot of these houses now is so large and you also get a trade off between flood damage versus wind damage.

The higher up you go, you know, the more wind damage when there is an event.

I think probably part of how the community changes will be based on, you know, the magnitude of storms.

Like, is it possible to live on the coast?

You know, it may not be possible.

And then, you know, that's something that you deal with at that time.

(slowly swelling note plays) - [Al] The first house I did on the water was in 1989 and it was an engineered house, but not every house on the water back then was engineered.

It depended on the client.

But now with the storms we've had and, you know, the insurance companies tightening up, I would say that a hundred percent of the houses built directly on the water have some degree of engineering, some more than others.

It's totally different than building a mile inland.

You know, it's just so much, so much engineering.

We have thousands of pounds of rebar in, in everything we pour along the water.

Basically you're trying to build for whatever Mother Nature sends our way and they're super strong houses.

If you wanted to live on the water, a lot like this is where you would wanna live because it's first floor elevation, 32 feet above sea level.

So that's a good place to be in a hurricane.

Houses that don't have a steel super structure don't have anchor bolts like this.

They would only be a half inch bolt, eight inches long.

These are three quarter inch bolts, two feet long.

So they go into the concrete and then the steel super structure bolts to it.

So I have over 60 of these bolts in this house.

The demand is strong.

All the builders that I compete against, a lot of 'em I'm friendly with and we're all busy.

You used to be able to build a sea wall and maybe add onto your seawall.

And if you go along the coast, you'll see the older houses all have different levels, sea walls.

But then they've figured out that if one person has a high sea level, high seawall that blocks the water from coming into their yard, it helps to flood somebody else's yard.

So now you can't add, you can repair your seawall, but there's there's no more building a taller seawall.

So you pretty much have to build your house at the right elevation.

So everything we do on the shoreline is based on the elevation above sea level.

And they actually raised zero one foot.

When I was a young, we were dairy farmers.

My family was, and because we're an early settler in town, we owned a big salt meadow.

And when I was a child, we still got salte on that meadow.

And when I drive by it now I look at it and like, there's no way you're going out there with a tractor and a hay baler because it's just, you know, I think in, you know, I don't know that the water's up a foot from where it was in the 1960s, but it's definitely up six or eight inches.

So there is something, you know, you can actually see these things happening along the coast, you know, and a lot of people that live on the coast that are low, close to elevation, you know, four or five are real nervous about when a big storm comes in.

(machine running, hopeful music begins) - [Nicole] So when people are thinking about sea level rise and climate change and coastal resilience, they're most likely thinking of beaches and kind of the waterfront.

But when you think about where that water comes from, so like all rivers and streams end up at the beach.

So by taking water that's going into the river at the headwaters and reducing flooding and providing opportunities to take some of that volume of water off the coast, it can make a big difference.

Right now we're seeing, you know, larger storm events more frequently, which means there's a lot more runoff.

And so in developed areas where there's a lot of paved surfaces, that can lead to a lot of pollution coming into our storm drains and our rivers and streams.

So providing those natural solutions inland, it kind of takes some of the strain off the coastal system.

So we are converting a dead end roadway into a green space that's gonna gonna serve a lot of purposes.

So green infrastructure is really a soft solution to managing rainwater.

So if you think about a forest or a grassy area, when it rains that water just kind of soaks into the ground and eventually reaches the groundwater and reaches our rivers.

And within a built environment, we've taken that with all the hard surfaces and the whole objective becomes getting the stormwater and rainwater off the surface as quickly as possible and away from the area where it falls, which usually leads to directly going into a river and carrying any of that kind of road runoff that particles and farm particular matter from tires and dirt and fertilizers directly into a storm drain.

So by using a more soft landscape where the water gets to flow into the ground naturally, it mimics the natural environment where those things that are being carried in the storm water have an opportunity to kind of soak in the ground and be filtered out before they reach our rivers and streams.

You know, water is really important to people and to our environment.

And when you really start looking at the problems that are plaguing, you know, our rivers and our streams and our beaches, a lot of that can be changed just by changing how we do things.

You know, not just accepting the status quo by reducing pavement and providing, you know, more systems that mimic nature or more natural spaces.

You know, we can have big impacts on water quality and getting people to think about how we're connected to the water is really important.

Not just for fishing and swimming, but to make sure that we have a place that we can use.

(machine running) - [Jack] We're here today on the Stewart B. McKinley Wildlife Refuge and this area is owned by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

And we are out here looking at implementation of the Great Meadows Marsh Project.

Part of this project is digging up phragmites, which is an invasive species and phragmites contaminated soil, and then going to be replanting those areas where the phragmites once were in hopes of recreating native ecosystem.

Marshes are a buffer from sea level rise and storm surges to the surrounding community.

So, you know, their ability to reflect wave damage from storms is very valuable.

A marsh, how it adapts to sea level rise and disturbance is that it migrates and it moves, what we call marsh migration.

And there's nowhere for this marsh to go because of it, of the development here and the rising sea level rise over here that it kind of gets trapped.

(melancholy music plays) - [Min] These ecosystems are some of the most productive in the world.

There are a whole number of species that are dependent upon a healthy salt marsh.

And so, given the fact that here in Connecticut we've lost over 50% of our original tidal marsh and we have a number of species that are vastly critically declining, we are trying our darnedest to try to maintain what we have.

The biggest objective for the Great Meadows Marsh is to try to create habitat for the salt marsh sparrow.

So the salt marsh sparrow is a critically endangered species, and it is dependent solely on what we call high marsh habitat, which is the higher portions of the marsh that only flood periodically.

The low marsh floods twice a day.

These birds, their nesting is dependent upon having 26 to 28 days of not flooding.

And with increasing sea level rise and degradation to our marshes, the populations are plummeting.

Our marshes, particularly those that are impacted through previous interventions through man, whether it be grid ditching or restrictions, whether it's due to roads, train tracks, are not keeping pace with sea level rise.

We're starting to see, however, in our marshes that are unrestricted, that have, for lack of a better word, pristine, that nature is actually resilient and that those marshes' elevations are keeping pace somewhat with sea level rise.

And, you know, we feel that it's because of unrestricted flow of water in and out of the marsh that allows for that sediment to settle in and over time, accrete and build that elevation as the seas rise.

I think, and this is my personal opinion, that we need to start taking seriously the impacts that we're having to the environment.

We are so underfunded to do any of this work.

So we're standing on this impoundment, we just spent 1.2 million to fix this dike and to restore three of the other impoundments that you would see if we kept walking further.

That only impacted about a hundred acres.

So we tried to restore about a hundred acres, cost us about 1.2 million.

When you look at the totality of the job in front of us, whether it's here in Connecticut, the northern shore of Long Island, or anywhere on the Atlantic coast, I mean, we need a hundred times that to do what we need to do.

And so, you know, I'm a realist, it's not gonna happen.

You know, when times are good, conservation is at the forefront.

When times are bad, no.

I don't know whether we're just buying ourselves time.

We hopefully are buying ourselves some time, but I think realistically we're fighting a losing battle.

(insistent music plays) - [Keith] So I go talk to people that are 50 or 55 or 60 years old that are living on the coast, and I say 30 years from now, sea level rise is gonna rise 20 inches and your house is gonna be inundated with flooding.

I don't know if I'm gonna be here then, right?

Because if I'm 60, 65 years old, 30 years is 90, 95 years old, they're like, that's my kid's problem, not my problem.

So one of the challenges is to make sure people understand that this is a reality.

I have to assume that there's gonna be a 20 inch sea level rise in 30 years.

I have to plan for that.

So what does that mean?

Either try to harden something or we may have to let something go back to nature.

The houses may be okay, but you gotta have a boat in order to get to 'em.

When we're talking about sea level rise, I worry about infrastructure, that's one thing.

But I also worry about if we get flooding and damage to houses, do we require the houses to be raised three feet so that they're above the flood zone, so that if we do get flooding coming in, you don't have to worry about a house getting knocked down.

The other thing we look at is if we get enough flooding and damage to houses, do we allow 'em to be rebuilt at all?

If you were to look at the City of Groton on a map, about three quarters of our boundary is water.

A lot of the solutions that we're going, that we will implement are gonna cost a lot of money.

If I say, okay, I'm gonna get serious about this, I'm gonna raise your taxes $1 million a year, that's roughly a 15 to 20% increase.

People are gonna say, okay, nope, you know, we don't want you to be a mayor anymore and a $1 million a year for 30 years, that's $30 million.

What's $30 million gonna do when you're talking about the entire coastline in the City of Groton?

(soft music plays) - So we're here in Poquonnock Bridge, a predominantly minority community.

It is the midway point between Boston and New York.

You know, when you compare it to other villages in Groton such as Mystic and Noank, Groton Long Point, Poquonnock Bridge is a community that does not have the financial resources that many of our neighboring villages have.

We're standing right now, if Groton is hit with a level three hurricane, it will cause significant storm surge in this low-lying area.

In my lifetime, Groton will face 20 inch sea level rise by 2050.

And when you look around at our infrastructure, speak with the experts on resiliency, it is abundantly clear that our community is vastly underprepared for rising sea levels, hurricane surge, and rising temperatures.

(thoughtful music plays) - [Jim] The thing I've come to learn is that the easy thing about climate change and climate change adaptation is projecting what's going to happen, right?

What you should do about it is a complicated thing, right?

So it's easy to say, well move your house back or raise your house up or build a road higher, but that has lots of consequences for other parts of people's life.

And it depends on how you react to it, is sort of emotional.

The other side of it is, once you decide what you want to do, there's a question of who's going to pay for it, right?

And those two things are kinda linked in some people's minds.

So they like, if they don't want to pay for it, they don't want to acknowledge that it's going to happen.

Or if they acknowledge it's gonna happen, they don't want to pay for it because they hope someone else like the government is going to pay for it.

And so negotiating what's best to do and how to pay for it in an equitable and politically acceptable way is a really complicated thing that physics and mathematics is not really helpful on that one, right?

It's about trying to figure out what people want and what is fair and just.

The difference between what it's like in 2100 and 2200 is really sensitive to what happens to CO2 emissions in the next decade.

And if we don't rapidly ramp down emissions, all emissions of CO2, the sea level rise that we can anticipate by 2200 is in tens of meters, right?

It's not like a few feet.

It's going to be something that we can't really engineer our way out of.

It's gonna make much of what is thought to be habitable space uninhabitable all across the world.

- [Sharon] I want people to know that we're all in this together.

And that unlike the beginning of this environmental racism where government sanctioned policies, segregated pollution, we need to understand that we're all in this together and that we must help each other.

And those of us at those decision making tables must include people who are most impacted because therein lies the solution to all of this.

And if you don't include people who are most impacted, then we all perish.

- I'm really concerned that, you know, in the future it's gonna get so bad, we're just gonna see walls all the way around Long Island Sound where they don't have rocky cliffs to protect them.

And all the wetlands that are along the edge are gonna be flooded out and all the land behind the wetlands is developed.

So they're gonna put walls there and there'll be no place for the wetlands to migrate.

I think we have the ability to turn this around and it's just a matter of staying consistent on how we go about it.

Learning from our mistakes and getting faster and faster at how we address these problems.

And like I said, you have to dance with nature.

You go straight at nature and you just bang your head against the wall, in the long run, you're gonna lose.

We're right there.

We can hold this future and keep getting better, keep upgrading our sewage plants, do greener building, retreat off the coastline so we're not walling up the beaches and shore of Long Island Sound and preserving that open space and those marshes.

Yeah, I think once we get there, we'll be fine.

(calm music continues) - Mhm, young people.

Definitely.

Because they are obviously our future, but their activism, I think, trying to bring awareness to subjects.

What I often hear young people talk about relevant to climate change is that we failed them as adults, that we contributed to this mess that they now have to inherit.

But I think we as adults have to hear those words from them and realize that we have a responsibility while we're still walking this earth to help them and change this reality that we're living in.

(boat motor whirring) - [Owen] That would be nine, wait 0.5?

5, 6, 7, 8.

4.839.

- [Speaker] And then pull up 0.3.

- Up, up, up.

Last year I was feeling a little bit of climate anxiety and just feeling uncertain about how my environment is faring against, climate change and stuff like that.

So I decided that I could try to do my own research project to try to give me some information, try to make me feel a little bit better.

- The salinity.

A lot of my friends from school and even here, I think all of us wanna pursue a field in science related topics.

So, I'm sure that we're gonna put in the research and we're gonna find ways to really make a difference with this problem.

I think that my generation is definitely well-informed on this topic because I feel like it's happening right in front of us.

We see the things that are going on and we see the real life effects of climate change and we know that if this continues, things can become worse and just terrible for our generation.

- [Audrey] My relationship with the Long Island Sound is that I've always been here, I've grown up here.

It's mostly all that I've known and I've always loved it.

It's always beautiful and it really is home.

I'm concerned that if we don't do something, everything can be ruined and there'd be like no way of changing everything.

There's not much we can do, but there is at least a little bit we can do.

And if we, if that little bit can affect anything in the long run, then I'll gladly do my part in helping it.