Sharing Solutions and Building Resilience at the 2026 Islands Coastal Conference
On a warm and sunny autumn day, 140 people gathered for the sold-out annual Islands Coastal Conference, held October 6, 2026, at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center. Experts working on the many aspects of sea level rise and erosion, community engagement and emergency planning, and fisheries and habitat restoration filled the day with presentations. During breaks, professionals and community members discussed how communities living on Martha’s Vineyard are building towards a more resilient future.
“None of this works without your work,” said Seth Rolbein, a senior policy advisor at Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance. “We need to understand our ecosystems. We need to understand our harbors. We need to understand how to be stewards of our environment.” In his keynote address, Rolbein told a story of how fishermen relied on the work of nonprofits, research institutions, and government agencies to weather the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The coast is not a line. The coast is our connection,” said Rolbein.
From their different vantage points, speakers detailed the tissues connecting the Martha’s Vineyard communities, which include fishermen, beachgoers, seniors, and members of The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), to name a few.
Community members, local leaders, and topic area experts have been pooling their knowledge to find solutions to the Vineyard’s changing landscapes. One thing was clear in all four conference sessions: every aspect of island life has been feeling the effects of more intense storms and rising seas.
“Sea level rise and high tide flooding in Massachusetts occur at rates that are faster than both the national and global average,” said Chris Piecuch, an associate scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, showing, on-screen, trends in various datasets as evidence. “We see that Massachusetts will experience further sea level rise.”
“We have high confidence in what we're going to see over the coming decades, which is actionable information that we can plan around,” said Piecuch.
Planning for Storms
“The most natural thing in the world are storms,” quipped Mark Borrelli, a research fellow at the University of Massachusetts Boston and director of coastal processes at Wilkinson Ecological Design. “Humans could not live on this planet were it not for hurricanes. It's a climate regulator. It pulls heat out of the tropics and makes it livable for us. Long term, millennial scale, we couldn't live here without them.”
Though storms make our planet habitable, Borrelli emphasized the need to prepare for them, especially the more intense ones in our future that will bring more flooding and erosion.
In a session focused on emergency response and the socioeconomics of storm recovery, Sakiko Isomichi, climate resilience planner at Martha's Vineyard Commission, focused on how dependable marine transportation systems are the linchpin of an island’s fragile supply chain.
“High-level analysis shows that we have about two days of food supply left to meet the needs on the island during emergencies,” said Isomichi, referring to Martha’s Vineyard. “And it turns out, we actually aren't the only island that was experiencing these issues.”
Through the MVP 2.0 initiative, funded by the Massachusetts Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Program, Vineyard residents were contacted last winter, which happened to feature several major snowstorms, to talk about their climate concerns. The initiative’s community engagement efforts aimed to identify what people were most concerned about regarding intensifying storms and rising sea levels, and how they wanted towns to build resilience.
“For many people, losing power can be really scary,” said Meghan Gombos of Sea Change Consulting, who worked with the Martha's Vineyard Commission on the island's municipal vulnerability preparedness planning. “It's either shutting off your water or your access to medical needs or communications, especially if you only have a landline or limited cell service. Whether boats stop running, or roads are closed, or driveways aren't plowed for a long time, people feel extremely isolated, and if they don't know where to go, that can also feel really scary.”
As she closed her update on the MVP 2.0 initiative, Gombos said she is “glad that the towns have come together and pooled resources, and are looking to have some emphasis on this building of social resilience, which is really critical for our whole community.”
Restoring Habitats
“So the definition of ecological restoration is that it's the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that's been damaged, degraded, or destroyed,” began Sara Grady, senior coastal ecologist at Mass Audubon. “When we're trying to restore a particular habitat, what we're doing is investing in a process, both an ecological process as well as the process of accomplishing the work that we want to do.”
The processes by which people steward the environment can look different depending on who’s participating in the effort.
Grady walked through some of the different frameworks for restoring salt marshes, which are in steep decline in Massachusetts. “We've lost about 41% since the 1800s.” Grady explained that rising seas are drowning marshes and eroding marshes, making them unable to absorb sea water and leading to increased flooding.
The Trustees, a land trust in Massachusetts, holds land across the state with diverse habitat types, including the Chappaquiddick salt marsh on Martha's Vineyard.
Assessments conducted by Woods Hole Group and Trustees showed that “salt marshes and barrier beaches came out as the two most vulnerable habitats that we really needed to address within our properties,” said Alejandra Narvaez, a coastal project manager at The Trustees. “We want to make sure we're not just holding these areas; we're actually making sure they're resilient and protecting habitat and public access in the foreseeable future.”
River herring and the habitats they rely on for breeding have been cared for by the Wampanoag people for thousands of years prior to European colonization, and the many years since.
“The fishery provided a means for tribal members to feed their families, and so plentiful was the amount of fish in this creek, that they could use their bare hands to catch them or just very simple dip netting,” said Maria Abate, research marine biologist at the Natural Resources Department of The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) and adjunct assistant professor of biology at Boston University. After the Wampanoag people were restricted to a western portion of Martha’s Vineyard, Herring Creek became their primary connection to river herring, or Alewife. “They're very significant to their culture and their spiritual connections.”
“So, what is driving the river herring's decline?” she asked. The rest of her talk described research from a partnership between the Tribe and UCSC that “found evidence that Alewife from Herring Creek were being caught in Atlantic herring and mackerel fisheries in consequential amounts. The magnitude of the bycatch events contributed to historic declines in the run.”
Abate closed by saying the research offered the best available science linking the Herring Creek fishery to commercial fisheries in southern New England. She also emphasized the need for advocacy and policy change as part of the process of restoring the river herring fishery.
The many experts at the conference demonstrated how building resilience requires strong collaborations across different topic areas. Farid Vahedifard, a professor at Tufts University, worked with the indigenous community on Martha’s Vineyard in his capacity as an engineer and discussed their relationships.
“We have to listen better,” Vahedifard said. “[The Wampanoag people] have their own history. They are living with that problem.” He added, “When you work hard and work as a team, good things happen.”
The Islands Coastal Conference on Martha’s Vineyard was hosted by WHOI Sea Grant, Cape Cod Cooperative Extension, Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), The Trustees, Martha’s Vineyard Commissions, and the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management. More information is available on the WHOI Sea Grant website.
The Islands Coastal Conference was attended by community members and professionals interested in learning more about the research, projects, and collaborations working to make Martha’s Vineyard stronger in the face of coastal changes.