The concept at the heart of the study is known as escape habitat planning. As climate change pushes ecosystems beyond their historical ranges, species must either adapt in place or move to survive. For coastal wetlands, movement means migrating landward, a process that requires both vertical space for sediment accumulation and lateral space for wetlands to form on adjacent uplands. When seawalls, roads, and subdivisions block that retreat, habitats become squeezed between rising water and immovable infrastructure, a phenomenon ecologists call coastal squeeze. In the southeastern United States, projections suggest up to two-thirds of future wetland migration will come at the expense of freshwater wetlands, while the remainder will consume already fragmented uplands, many of which harbor endemic species found nowhere else.

Florida presents a uniquely difficult case. The state’s 1,931-kilometer coastline is home to more than two-thirds of its 23.4 million residents, and its flat topography and porous limestone bedrock make it exceptionally vulnerable not only to inundation but to saltwater intrusion into the aquifers that supply most of its freshwater. Projections indicate that up to 2 meters of sea-level rise could flood more than 7,770 square kilometers of the state, with the southern Gulf Coast and the Everglades bearing the brunt. Coastal forests are already converting to ghost forests, landscapes of dead trees killed by inundation and salt, while nearly half of Florida’s island-dependent species face major extinction risks. Yet some systems retain mobility: salt marshes can transgress landward, and mangroves are expanding northward as freeze events become rarer.

The research team built and compared two complementary models. The first, the Florida Ecological Greenways Network Coastal-to-Inland Connectivity Model, is deliberately simple. Using Esri’s Cost Distance tool and the state’s Cooperative Land Cover dataset, it treats all undeveloped, ecologically suitable land as equally permeable, assigning a uniform resistance value of one, and then calculates continuous pathways along which coastal natural communities could theoretically migrate inland. The study area was delineated using NOAA’s 3-meter sea-level rise model with an additional two-mile buffer. This data-efficient approach is highly transferable to other regions and is intended to support strategic land acquisition decisions with minimal input requirements.

The second model, the Integrated Coastal Connectivity Model, is far richer in data. Built with Omniscape, a circuit-theory-based connectivity tool implemented in the Julia programming language, it combines expert-ranked land cover classifications with high-resolution flood hazard maps from JBA Risk Management, topographic diversity data derived from satellite elevation products, and sea-level rise projections from two established marsh migration models. On the Gulf Coast, the team used the Sea Level Affecting Marshes Model, or SLAMM, a tool originally developed in the mid-1980s with funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that simulates inundation, erosion, sediment accretion, overwash, saturation, and salinity shifts. Along the Atlantic coast, where comprehensive SLAMM results were unavailable, they substituted the NOAA Marsh Migration Model, which combines land cover data, digital elevation models, and tidal datum surfaces to project marsh persistence, migration, or loss.

One of the study’s most technically interesting choices involves how water itself was parameterized. The researchers tested scenarios in which open marine areas were assigned extreme resistance values and found that both extremes distorted the results. Assigning a value of ten, intended to represent high permeability, inadvertently created artificial islands of low resistance surrounded by higher-resistance matrices, while a value of zero blocked movement entirely. They settled on an intermediate, neutral value of six, which better captured continuous ecological flow along the coastline. Flood data was processed using fuzzy logic, with a gamma overlay combining weighted fuzzy sums and products to highlight areas that flood repeatedly across multiple return periods, from 20-year to 1,500-year events, rather than treating each flood scenario independently.

The results reveal both convergence and striking divergence between the two approaches. The simpler cost-distance model identified its most extensive migration corridors in the Big Bend and Panhandle regions, where natural land cover remains intact, and highlighted the Suwannee River basin and Apalachicola lowlands as critical connectivity zones. The integrated model showed that under a 1-meter rise, many low-lying Gulf Coast wetlands would be inundated, shrinking corridors to localized pockets, and under 2 meters, connectivity would collapse further across southwest Florida and the Big Bend. Agreement between the two models fell as low as 59 percent in some regions, and adding topographic diversity to the resistance surface reduced agreement by an additional 5 to 10 percent, a finding the authors did not fully anticipate.

That divergence may be the study’s most consequential insight. Florida is often perceived as uniformly flat, but its subtle microtopography, relict dune ridges, karst features such as sinkholes and springs, and slight elevation gradients, has shaped its biodiversity for millennia. Over successive cycles of rising and falling seas, populations isolated on upland ridges evolved into endemic species through allopatric speciation. The integrated model’s sensitivity to topographic diversity suggests these modest features act as stepping stones and microrefugia, offering drier soils, thermal variation, and resistance to inundation. Conserving geophysically complex areas slows the velocity of climate change exposure for species and provides microclimates that buffer against extremes, meaning that even centimeter-scale terrain variation matters when the entire landscape sits barely above the tide line.

The practical payoff comes in the form of land acquisition priorities. The team overlaid their connectivity outputs on the Florida Forever Board of Trustees Projects layer, which catalogs 362 proposed conservation land purchases not yet protected, and ranked roughly 19,000 individual parcels based on corridor overlap, watershed priority, and elevation. Agreement between the two models increased steadily with ranking quality, from 29.45 percent in the lowest 30 percent of parcels to 63.60 percent in the top 10 percent. In other words, while the models disagree about lower-priority areas, they converge substantially on the highest-value conservation targets, and many of those top-scoring parcels already align with existing state acquisition goals. This convergence gives planners a defensible basis for tiered decision-making, where areas of model agreement can trigger immediate action and divergent areas warrant monitoring or adaptive management.

The authors are careful to note the limits of their framework. The models do not account for ocean warming, freeze-driven shifts between mangrove and marsh dominance, groundwater levels, sediment supply, or the dispersal capacities of individual species, and they should be read as broad-scale screening tools rather than precise predictions. Future work could incorporate focal species, soils data, and higher-resolution elevation analysis. Still, the study demonstrates that integrating climate exposure and geomorphological variation into connectivity analysis can bridge traditional coarse-filter modeling with advanced spatial techniques, producing a transferable template for any coastal region facing the same existential question: not whether the sea will rise, but whether the ecosystems that depend on dry land will have somewhere left to go.

Subject of Research: Modeling coastal-to-inland ecological connectivity and wetland migration corridors under sea-level rise in Florida

Article Title: Sea level rise escape planning for Florida’s coastal ecosystems

Article References: Sea level rise escape planning for Florida’s coastal ecosystems. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44353-025-00064-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44353-025-00064-w

Keywords: sea-level rise, ecological connectivity, coastal wetlands, marsh migration, Florida, SLAMM, Omniscape, conservation planning, topographic diversity, land acquisition, climate adaptation, ghost forests

The study is grounded in a well-documented global problem. Municipal solid waste generation has been rising across the developing world as urban populations swell, and the infrastructure required to collect, transport, and dispose of that waste has not kept pace. In many cities, poor spatial planning has left authorities scrambling to find suitable locations for waste facilities, and the sites they choose are often close to human settlements. That proximity transforms an engineering problem into a social one: residents living near dumpsites bear the brunt of foul odours, disease vectors, contaminated runoff, and declining property values, while the agencies responsible for the sites frequently lack the resources to mitigate those harms. The result, the study finds, is a recurring pattern of contestation that undermines both sanitation outcomes and public trust.

To understand how these conflicts unfold on the ground, Boampong adopted a phenomenological research design, an approach that seeks to capture the lived experiences of people directly involved in a phenomenon. The fieldwork combined in-depth interviews with forty-five key informants, including government officials, waste managers, traditional leaders, and landowners, with three focus group discussions involving thirty residents from communities affected by a dumpsite in Accra. Participants were selected purposively, meaning they were chosen because of their direct knowledge of and involvement in the issues under investigation. The interviews followed a semi-structured guide, allowing respondents to raise concerns the researcher had not anticipated while still ensuring that core themes were covered consistently across sessions.

The methodological rigor of the study reflects established qualitative research standards. All interview sessions were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, and the transcripts were analyzed using the six-step thematic content analysis framework developed by psychologists Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke. This approach moves systematically from familiarization with the data, through initial coding and the generation, review, and definition of themes, to final reporting. Ethical considerations were addressed in conformity with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the study protocol and data collection instruments were submitted to the Ethics Review Board of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology for approval before fieldwork began. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to the qualitative interviews, and the author declares no competing interests and received no external funding for the work.

The central finding of the research is that contestations over dumpsites in Accra operate along several axes simultaneously. The most visible axis pits waste management companies against community members, who complain of nuisances such as foul odour and disease emanating from the disposal sites. But the study reveals a second, less visible axis: conflicts between district assemblies themselves over jurisdiction and over the revenue generated by dumpsite operations. Because dumpsites sit at the boundaries of administrative territories and generate fees and levies, they can become objects of fiscal competition between local authorities, complicating oversight and accountability. This multi-directional character of the conflict, the study suggests, has been largely overlooked in earlier framings that treated dumpsite disputes as a simple community-versus-company binary.

Beneath these competing interests lie structural drivers that the study identifies as exacerbating the conflicts. The first is the mode of land acquisition used for dumpsite siting. When state actors acquire land for waste disposal without adequate consultation or transparent procedures, the resulting sense of dispossession among landowners and residents fuels resistance that can persist for years. The second driver is a lack of resources: waste managers in Accra operate with limited budgets, aging equipment, and insufficient personnel, which makes it difficult to operate disposal sites according to accepted standards for lining, covering, and leachate control. The third is weak enforcement of sanitation bye-laws, which allows violations to accumulate and signals to both operators and residents that the rules governing waste facilities are negotiable.

The implications of these findings extend well beyond the neighborhoods surrounding Accra’s dumpsites. Sanitation failures impose measurable costs on public health, with poorly managed waste contributing to the spread of diarrheal diseases, respiratory irritation, and vector-borne illnesses. They also impose economic costs, depressing land values and discouraging investment in affected areas. And they impose political costs, eroding the legitimacy of local governments that are seen as unable to protect residents from the externalities of essential infrastructure. In Accra, as in many rapidly growing cities, the dumpsite has become a physical embodiment of the gap between urban growth and institutional capacity, a place where planning failures, fiscal pressures, and community grievances converge.

The study’s recommendations follow directly from its diagnosis. Boampong calls for the implementation of strategies to ensure strict compliance with dumpsite guidelines in relation to the siting of disposal sites, encompassing the modes of land acquisition, the proximity of facilities to human settlements, and waste minimization. On land acquisition, the implication is that transparent, consultative processes are not merely procedural niceties but preconditions for the social license that waste facilities require. On proximity, the recommendation points toward stronger spatial planning controls that keep disposal sites at appropriate distances from homes, schools, and water sources. On waste minimization, the study proposes the establishment of a recycling and compost facility that would considerably reduce the demand for urban land for waste disposal, shrinking the volume of material that must be buried and, with it, the scale of the conflicts that burial generates.

The recycling and composting recommendation deserves particular attention because it reframes the sanitation crisis as a resource-flow problem rather than a purely siting problem. Organic matter typically constitutes the largest fraction of municipal solid waste in West African cities, and diverting that fraction into compost for agriculture would simultaneously extend the lifespan of existing disposal sites, reduce the odour and leachate problems that drive community protests, and create a marketable product. Recycling streams for plastics, metals, and paper would further reduce the burden on land while creating employment. The study’s argument is that every tonne of waste diverted is a tonne that does not need to be fought over, making waste minimization a conflict-prevention strategy as much as an environmental one.

For researchers and policymakers watching urban Africa, the Accra study offers a template for understanding sanitation disputes as governance disputes. The finding that district assemblies contest jurisdiction and revenue over dumpsites suggests that technical fixes, such as better liners or more trucks, will not resolve conflicts rooted in institutional fragmentation and fiscal incentives. Similarly, the finding that land acquisition practices fuel durable grievances suggests that community engagement must begin long before the first truck arrives at a proposed site. As cities across the developing world grapple with rising waste volumes and shrinking disposal capacity, the Accra experience demonstrates that the hardest problems are not buried in the ground but embedded in the relationships between the state, the market, and the communities that live with the consequences of urban sanitation decisions every day.

Subject of Research: Urban sanitation conflicts over dumpsite siting and waste management governance in Accra, Ghana

Article Title: Urban sanitation crisis and contestations over dumpsites in Accra, Ghana

Article References: Boampong, M. S. (2026). Urban sanitation crisis and contestations over dumpsites in Accra, Ghana. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04636-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04636-1

Keywords: urban sanitation, municipal solid waste, dumpsites, Accra, Ghana, waste management, land acquisition, environmental conflict, district assemblies, recycling, composting, spatial planning