Athena’s single slide for her 3MT presentation
Very impressed by Athena Iraji’s three-minute thesis heat performance yesterday, so I asked her if I could post it here. Thanks, Athena, and congratulations.
Have you ever wondered what happens when policies don’t go through? It’s been unfolding way closer than you think- right along our coast. This dynamic, complex space we’ve relied on since the beginning of settlement, and long before that.
Nova Scotia, Canada’s ocean playground, our home! Driving along the shore, you pass beautiful cottages perched on cliffs and coves: small human dreams facing a vast, changing world.
Lately, the environment has been fighting back. Storms cut deeper. The tides creep higher. The coastline shifts whether we are ready or not.
The Coastal Protection Act was meant to be a safeguard — a policy, hope, for those who care about their home, their community, and their playground. for more than a decade, it lived in the shadows: delayed, uncertain, unimplemented.
And uncertainty changes people. It made us hesitant. Unsure. And sometimes too eager to act, to build now, before rules arrived, before chances slipped away. And now? After years of waiting, we’re told: You’re on your own.
My research looks directly at what happened during that long period of policy uncertainty. How did coastal development change when the future of the Act was unclear? Who built? Where? And what can these patterns tell us about how climate risk is governed when policy stalls?
And it was incredibly hard to answer these questions. The opacity of the policy is tied to the opacity of the data — and Nova Scotia seems to be lacking on both fronts. The more I worked with municipal and provincial open datasets, the more I realized how incomplete or inconsistent they could be. That challenge wasn’t just a technical hurdle, it became part of the story itself.
What I’ve found is that the absence of clear rules shapes the coastline just as powerfully as the presence of rules would have. Delay becomes a decision. Uncertainty becomes a force that moves people, and buildings, closer to risk. In the end, I keep returning to the same question they asked in the Rights of Way podcast: Whose ocean playground is this?
Athena competing at 3MT
