Current Nature: Nantucket’s 2nd Annual Climate Change Summit Returns September 4th

Dr. Sarah Bois, Linda Loring Nature Fondation • Aug 26, 2024

Photo by Kit Noble

The second annual Nantucket Climate Change Summit will be held September 4th from 4-6:30 pm, hosted at the Great Harbor Yacht Club and organized by the Linda Loring Nature Foundation and the Nantucket Conservation Foundation with support from the Nantucket Community Foundation’s Remain Nantucket Fund. This year’s summit will consist of a panel of speakers from various island industries discussing how their industry is adapting to changes and what they may be preparing for in the near future. Panelists were selected to represent a wide array of island life including historic preservation and tourism, commercial fishing and aquaculture, and landscape and garden design.

This year’s panelists:

Niles Parker – executive director of the Nantucket Historical Association will talk about the impacts of climate and adaption of historic buildings and archives as well as impressions from visitors to these historic structures.

Matt Herr - owner of Grey Lady Oyster and long-time fisherman and shell fisherman on Nantucket. Matt has commercially fished for cod, lobster, conch, and scallops and now is an oyster farmer. Between commercial fishing and now into aquaculture, Matt has seen a lot of changes in the industry some, but not all, related to the changing climate.

Julie Jordin is the owner of Garden Design Company and champion of native plants and adaptation to climate change. She uses native plants as one part of a broad palette for her designs incorporating aspects of the surrounding ecology. “Making deeply informed decisions about which plants should go where,” she notes on her website, “saves time, money, and resources (and it also makes the plants happy).”

Our panel will be moderated by Cecil Barron Jensen, executive director of Remain. Under Cecil’s leadership at Remain, the organization has focused on food systems, food insecurity, affordable housing, architectural salvage reuse, and nature-based solutions to climate challenges. She will bring this knowledge and her background in art and history to the conversation with our panel. Organizers also look forward to questions and comments from the audience.

“We conceived the Nantucket Climate Change Summit to understand and explore what's happening right here on Nantucket and how our island is adapting to change. We hear about erosion and sea level rise but the impacts of a changing climate are much broader than that. The Summit helps bring the community together to learn and share and provide hope for the future!” – Dr. Jen Karberg (NCF), co-founder of the Summit.

Last year’s inaugural Summit was a huge success with sold-out registration and insightful questions from the audience. Dr. Sarah Bois notes, “We were able to reach a broad audience last year and have discussions with many new faces. In 2023, we focused on climate change impacts, and what people were seeing and experiencing in the natural world. We want to build on that and think about how we’re adapting and where there may be opportunities.”

Beyond the recognition of what people are experiencing, organizers hope to translate some of this discussion into action. We are hoping that people can have some takeaways, large and small, to bring home. We are often asked how people can help or what they can do. Each panelist is asked to bring some ideas to the table from their area of expertise and drawn from their experiences.

We hope to tell stories of the people in our community grappling with the challenges of our changing world and exploring possible solutions. Everyone on-island, year-rounders and seasonal alike, are stakeholders with a vested interest in the island. It’s beyond just getting people to “believe” in climate change. We’ve moved on to how are we living with it.

“Our hope is to ignite a conversation about these and other aspects of island life. What’s changing, how are we adapting, and how are we planning for the future? It isn’t just the far future, though, but how the community goes about their daily lives on island today with the impacts we’re already seeing,” says Dr. Sarah Bois (LLNF), co-founder of the Summit.

The talks and panel will be followed by a small reception and raw bar to help keep the conversation going. Organizers hope to capture the ideas, adaptation strategies and calls to action from the panelists as well as the audience members.

For those unable to attend in person, this year’s Summit will be recorded by NCTV, and the recording made available at a later date.

Organizers from both NCF and LLNF hope to keep the conversation going and are planning more walks and events later in the 2024/2025 season. Keep an eye out for the summit website and calendar of events for each organization throughout the year. To learn more and to register for this year’s Summit, check out the Nantucket Climate Change Summit website: www.ackclimatesummit.com.