Background/Objectives

The east coast of the United States comprised of New Jersey shoreline has been experiencing numerous challenges including shoreline erosion and landward migration of wetlands. This coastline is more susceptible to climate change-induced events such as surges, and coastal flooding than neighboring coastal states including New York. All kinds of establishments including tourism infrastructures, real estate, water supply, transport, and communication infrastructures are under burgeoning threat from climatic events. To address the the vulnerability of relatively dense New Jersey coast various investment programs/projects have been initiated. Much research has identified the challenges to building resilience on the New Jersey coast. Although a nature-based solution has appeared as an important approach to building resilience, there is a lack of research that present the current state of research on nature-based solution in the New Jersey coast. This research is planned to fill this knowledge gap in two ways. The first review is of literature to identify and summarize the current state of research on resilience building through nature-based solutions on the New Jersey coast. Second, it will present a trend of the scope and approach to resilience research on the New Jersey coast.

Approach/Activities

This research heavily draws on a literature review and extensive use of Scopus/WoS (Web of Science) database of published articles for bibliometric analysis.  For bibliometric analysis, the Web of Science (WoS) database would serve as the source of data and information. More than 1500 peer-reviewed journal articles were initially selected using the following search formula/code from advanced search options.

TOPIC: ("Climate change" OR "Vulnerability") AND TOPIC: ("Resilience" OR "Nature-based solution") AND TOPIC: ("New Jersey coast" OR "East coast")

Refined by: Open Access Articles published during 2000-2023.

From the WoS database, the selected information was exported to the open-source bibliometric software VOSviewer. The theoretical framework of bibliometric analysis was developed from the literature review. In VOSviewer, density visualization tools are used to analyze the co-occurrence of high-frequency words/phrases such as challenges and options related to building resilience of the New Jersey coast in the exported bibliometric database of more than 1500 articles. Similarly, the network visualization tools analyze the institutions leading and collaborating in the realm of NBS-resilience-Jersey Coast. The tools permit visualization of the focus of the literature on NBS-resilience-New Jersey Coast nexus.

Results/Lessons Learned

The result is emerging. The early output/result of cooccurrence shows that the largest group of publications is concerned about the policy and strategic intervention to enhance adaptation and mitigation to lower the impacts of climate change on the coastal ecosystem and resources. This group shows that the dominant word 'NBS' concurrently appears with 'policy', 'practice', 'challenge', 'community', 'sustainability', 'biodiversity', and 'ecosystem',

The network analysis shows four groups of intuitions dominating the NBS-resilience-New Jersey Coast nexus. The four groups include 17 institutions whose authors have at least 10 Web of Science-indexed co-authored publications on the NBS-resilience-New Jersey Coast nexus. Full findings would be presented in the final paper.