Most regional climate planning assumes change will be slow and linear. A collaboration between oceanographers and policy experts in Maine is asking what happens if it isn’t.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is a system of ocean currents that plays a major role in regulating temperatures and weather patterns across the North Atlantic and the U.S. Northeast. Scientific evidence suggests AMOC may be slowing, and models indicate that a significant disruption could produce abrupt, nonlinear climate shifts far more severe than most current planning scenarios anticipate.

Yet the resilience strategies and infrastructure investments being made today by Northeastern states largely assume gradual change. This project is designed to surface that mismatch and give regional decision-makers the tools to respond to it.

The University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute and the Climate Security Initiative are partnering to translate complex AMOC science into accessible, actionable information for state and regional policymakers. The team will analyze projections from ten to fifteen state-of-the-art climate models, incorporate key findings into the University of Maine’s publicly accessible Climate Reanalyzer platform, and develop a sector-specific digital brief targeted at the regional collaboratives and inter-state bodies that make long-horizon infrastructure and policy decisions for the Northeast.

Target audiences include participants in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the Northeastern States Emergency Consortium, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council on Oceans, and state-level agencies in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and beyond — states that play an outsized role in shaping regional and national climate policy. The digital brief is designed as a flexible tool, adaptable for different sectors and stakeholder audiences, and the team plans to engage these audiences directly through public consultation processes, conferences, and legislative forums.

CO2 Foundation has always been focused on helping increase public understanding of (and action in the face of) climate risks. The gap between what climate science now suggests is possible and what most planning processes actually account for is significant — and closing it requires both rigorous modeling and the policy translation work to make that science usable by the people making consequential decisions.