Climate adaptation and policy-induced inflation of coastal property value.

Smith studies the economics of the oceans, including fisheries, marine ecosystems, seafood markets, and coastal climate adaptation. He has written on a range of policy-relevant topics, including economics of marine reserves, seasonal closures in fisheries, ecosystem-based management, catch shares, nutrient pollution, aquaculture, genetically modified foods, the global seafood trade, organic agriculture, coastal property markets, and coastal responses to climate change. He is best known for identifying unintended consequences of marine and coastal policies that ignore human behavioral feedbacks. Smith’s methodological interests span micro-econometrics, optimal control theory, time series analysis, and numerical modeling of coupled human-natural systems. Smith’s published work appears in The American Economic Review, Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and a number of other scholarly journals that span environmental economics, fisheries science, marine policy, ecology, and the geo-sciences. Smith has received national and international awards, including the Quality of Research Discovery from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, Outstanding Article in Marine Resource Economics, and an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, and the Research Council of Norway. Smith has served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Marine Resource Economics, Co-Editor of the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, and Co-Editor of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. He served as a member of the Scientific and Statistical Committee of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and currently serves on the Ocean Studies Board of the National Academies.

Murray, a geomorphologist, studies how Earth-surface environments are shaped, and how they change over time, especially in response to changing forcing. He has addressed phenomena in desert, artic, alpine, and riverine environments, although most of his recent research focuses on coastal environments. Much of his research addresses couplings between physical and ecological processes, and couplings between natural and human dynamics. Murray approaches natural systems, and human/natural coupled systems, with the perspective and techniques developed in the study of nonlinear dynamics and complex systems, looking for possibly simple, emergent interactions that could explain apparently complicated behaviors. He develops and uses relatively simple, numerical models to test such hypotheses, and uses observations in developing hypotheses and testing models (using strategies and types of model predictions most effective for testing the usefulness of the type of model in question, in specific scientific contexts). Murray’s most recent research falls under three umbrellas, investigating: 1) how changes in the size and shape of river deltas can be driven by couplings between river processes, coastal processes, and sea-level rise, and by couplings between physical and ecological processes; 2) how coastlines (sandy and rocky) are shaped and reshaped over time, including the effects of changing storm climates; 3) how coastal barriers and back-barrier marshes and bays respond to changing rates of sea-level rise and storm impacts. Some of the research under each of these umbrellas addresses couplings between human actions and landscape/ecosystem evolution.