UC Berkeley

Global warming is producing countless changes in the biogeophysical world, and willincreasingly force human responses to them. These challenges are evident everywhere: in all manner of resource use, growth and development processes; in the intensification of climate risks, hazards and natural disasters; and in the sociopolitical and socioeconomic systems that must confront this paradigm shift in earnest during the 21st century. This dissertation seeks to situate prominent and emergent issues of how this confrontation and the changes induced by it—adaptation--function and matter in the context of environmental design and planning. In particular, and because of the global scale and widespread socioenvironmental issues involved, the work focuses on sea level rise (SLR) and issues stemming from its impacts on developed shorelines and the ecological complexes and structures evident therein. Human beings have deep roots in the manipulation of landscapes, especially as they concern the role and resources that coastal waterbodies and waterways represent, through the active design and physical defining of topography: how the shape and elevational contours of land affect flows and functions of water. Accordingly, the introduction herein frames the roles of landform as an elemental aspect of the construction and spatial planning of urban coastal and shoreline zones, and focuses on the physical materials, including actively-gathered geomaterial resources called sediment that compose the basic building blocks of constructed landforms. In chapter one, the interplay of various terms and concepts involved in climate change adaptation that matter in the context of spatial planning are articulated and clarified to frame ways in which challenges and opportunities of the era may be described. Chapter two then works to establish areas of much-needed consideration for the fields of landscape architecture and environmental planning to enfold into its professional practice milieu: namely tools and techniques from industrial ecology, which has been traditionally applied almost exclusively to climate mitigation (as opposed to adaptation). The third and final chapter discusses the application of modeling methods to an excavated sediment budget in an approach designed to assess aspects of the climate change future of a case study region. The work helps illustrate several insights and critical questions that are discussed in the final conclusion section.