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Studies show that by the year 2100, in a high greenhouse gas emission scenario, the sea level is expected to rise more than three feet, and extreme weather events are projected to occur more frequently.

Those in coastal areas will be threatened with flooding, beach erosion, and changes in ecosystems. What will they lose? How will people adapt? How will economically strained coastal communities find the resources they need to survive?

Professor and Roger M. Lynch Chair in Economics William Fernando Vásquez Mazariegos, PhD, has charted a course to find potential solutions in his project, “In Deep Waters: Perceptions, Intentions, and Adaptation to Sea Level Rise and Related Impacts,” which he conducted as a recipient of the Wall Award, through the University’s Robert E. Wall Faculty Award Program.

Specializing in the sustainable development of Latin America, Dr. Vásquez’s research has taken him across the globe and most recently, for this Sea Level Rise (SLR) project, to meet the people of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; San Andres Island, Colombia; and the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador.

“When you are talking about economics,” Dr. Vásquez said in his public Wall Award Lecture this past November, his wide, easy smile on display, “you are always talking about people.”

Dr. Vásquez explained that sea level rise is “a more complex hazard than other natural disasters. It is not easy for families to decide on measures to adapt to SLR due to the uncertainty of the timing, scope, and intensity of future SLR effects. In this context of uncertainty, it is crucial to improve our understanding of how households perceive SLR and how they plan to respond to it.”

Dr. Vásquez, a voluble man with a shock of dark curls, begins each study on the ground by collecting qualitative data. Which, for him and his research team, means talking. Lots of talking. It starts with his taxi driver from the airport and includes everyone from tourists, to shop owners, to public officials. Scores of people each day.

“One of the things that I want to do in my research,” Dr. Vásquez said, “is to show the preferences people have for better policies, better services, and proactive measures against climate change.”

Dr. Vásquez, whose academic credentials include four master’s degrees and a PhD in economics from the University of New Mexico, asks households and individuals questions: about their experiences with water quality, about potential interruptions to their water services, about the effects of tourism on their communities, about whether they’d be willing to pay to protect their homes or engage in volunteer efforts. He’s found that “people are willing to talk” and he uses their comments to design more official instruments for study.

“People want changes. In the political arena, they want to tackle these problems,” he said. “But, they don’t trust the authorities and I think that that is the main problem. I think that our social contract is broken.”

Originally from southern Guatemala near the Pacific coast, Dr. Vásquez grew up in a sugarcane farming community where the cane reeds were burned each harvest then slashed for the next. His family was middle-income and still Dr. Vásquez remembers regular water shortages. As a boy playing basketball with his friends, he would suck an empty spigot for any drop of drink, and his family would shower in rainwater that fell from gutters.

In his Wall Award research, Dr. Vásquez uncovered similar water inequities, the worst being in San Andres, Colombia, where water is consistently piped to tourists, but is only available to locals on a monthly basis or less. When sea levels rise over the next few decades and saltwater infiltrates fresh water resources, communities like San Andres will be decimated.

The second stage of Dr. Vásquez’s research — which is supported by the work and expertise of more than 15 interdisciplinary researchers around the world — utilizes other measures of mining and recording majority preferences for mitigating climate change.

Dr. Vásquez and his team offer “choice experiments,” or more formal surveys that give distinct options to respondents, in which they might express their preferences for how they would take on the climate change challenge.

All of this to assess the public’s willingness to pay for services that might alleviate the effects of climate change on their communities and to determine the services that would elicit broad support.

While everyone concedes that there needs to be large-scale, global, international efforts to mitigate climate change, Dr. Vásquez stresses that there’s much that can be done on the local level.

“In my opinion, mitigation and adaptation to climate change needs both approaches, bottom-up and top-down. My research intends to learn what locals are willing to do, pay for, give to, in order to address different events related to climate change and sea level rise.”

For instance, in Brazil, Dr. Vásquez’ research showed that households in the state of Rio de Janeiro are not willing to pay additional taxes to cope with sea level rise, presumably because perceived corruption of the government. Alternatively, his project detailed that people are willing to give monetary donations and volunteer time to NGOs that aim to raise awareness and implement projects to adapt to sea level rise.

In the Galápagos, one of the premiere eco-tourism destinations in the world, where leathery iguanas sprawl on street corners, and where Dr. Vásquez has found himself “face-to-face with a giant tor toise,” his research was focused on boat owners and tourists.

Dr. Vásquez and his research team spoke to hundreds of people about the potential switch from fossil-fueled boats to electric ones, as a way to assess the economic viabil ity of electric aquatic vehicles in that area. His formal survey showed that the tourists he questioned were actually willing to pay double the asking fee to ride in an electric boat, because of the lessened environmental implications.

Once his data is gathered, Dr. Vásquez ties it into economic feasibility proposals and presents it to local elected officials, paving the way to a plan for the future of these coastal communities.

“We are already speaking with coopera tives in the Galápagos to see what they think about it and how [electric boats] might effect green mobility on the islands,” Dr. Vásquez said, holding a cup of black Guatemalan coffee, sitting at his desk in the Charles F. Dolan School of Business. “This is one of those examples in which we can experience human beings and nature living together. If we care more about our world, beyond just ourselves, it humbles us. We are all just part of something greater.”

Robert E. Wall Faculty Award Program

The Robert E. Wall Faculty Award Program, initiated during spring 1994, fosters faculty scholarly research or artistic creativity at Fairfield and celebrates the outcome of these efforts within the University community. All tenured faculty are invited to submit a research proposal for consideration by the provost, the academic deans, and the chair of the faculty research committee. The awardee is granted a semester-long sabbatical to pursue their research project.

“Unique to Fairfield, the Wall Award has allowed nearly 30 expert faculty members to pursue important research from their diverse fields,” said Walter Rankin, PhD, vice provost for graduate, continuing, and professional studies. “The potential impact of this research to improve the lives of those in marginalized communities reflects Fairfield’s mission as well as Professor Vásquez’s deep academic expertise.”