Farida Haddad works on the gap between a global climate projection and a decision about a specific stretch of coast. Global mean sea level rise is a well-constrained number that is almost useless locally. What a planner needs is the change at their shoreline, which depends on ocean circulation, land motion, ice sheet geometry and the storm regime, and which carries an uncertainty that is frequently larger than the mean.
Her group produces regional projections and, more usefully, spends a great deal of effort on how to present the uncertainty so that it informs a decision rather than paralyzing one. Her position is that giving a planner a range and no guidance on how to use it is a way of transferring a scientific problem to someone with less capacity to solve it.
She works closely with the coastal resilience group and co-teaches with the policy faculty, which she describes as the most productive difficult conversation of her career.
Haddad teaches ENVS 380 Climate Change and Coasts and contributes to OCEA 340 Ocean Circulation and Climate. She supervises graduate students in the MS in Coastal Resilience.