The two cities couldn’t be more different: Newport Beach with its wealth and expensive beachfront homes, and Tijuana, with its chaotic, crumbling slums.

But they also share something important – vulnerability to a potentially rising sea. Both are built on coastal estuaries, where rivers meet the sea. And both will face severe flooding as a result of global warming.

So teams of scientists and students from UC Irvine have begun a four-year, $2.8 million effort called FloodRISE to find out what residents of Newport and Tijuana know and feel about the dangers ahead, and to develop house-by-house, high-precision computer models of the flooding heading their way.

“We’re trying to increase awareness with better information, so people can make better decisions,” said Brett Sanders, a UCI professor and leader of the project.

Sanders, who teaches civil and environmental engineering, added: “What we hope is to have a framework where ideas for interventions can be discussed.”

Behind the door-to-door surveys and cutting-edge research, however, is an even deeper purpose.

The UCI teams know that despite scientists’ best intentions, efforts to tell an often resistant public about climate change have brought, at best, limited success.

They’re hoping to change that.

NO LECTURES

Richard Matthew, a FloodRISE project leader who teaches social ecology at UCI, says people talking about climate change have been poor communicators, with messages about science sometimes morphing into lectures about character.

“If you say to somebody, ‘Driving an SUV makes you … irresponsible,’ and they are driving an SUV because they think they are maximizing the safety of their four children, they’re going to turn off completely,” Matthew said.

The researchers are learning that their own preconceived ideas about their message, and who will – or won’t – listen to it, don’t always hold water.

Newport Beach, for example, isn’t as resistant to hearing about climate change as researchers expected.

“We were told by many people that Newport Beach has a very distinctive character and culture that is largely skeptical of climate change, and sees climate change as too closely linked to higher taxes and government regulation,” Matthew said.

“But as we’ve done the research, we’ve discovered much more variety than people sometimes assume.”

Larry Leifer, 79, a Newport Beach resident for 25 years, spoke recently to the students taking door-to-door surveys about flooding, and even provided the researchers with photos of past flooding in Newport.

For him, climate change isn’t an abstraction.

“It’s going to get worse, obviously, with the calving of icebergs off the Arctic and Antarctica,” he said.

One factor making it hard to convince people in both cities that global warming is happening is the fact that its effects haven’t yet been felt much on the West Coast. The sea level has risen more slowly here than in other parts of the world. And regular, climate-related flooding has been more common in places like Norfolk, Va., than in this region.

Still, our region hasn’t escaped climate change. Large, wet storms – like the kind that can be spawned by El Niño, a warming of eastern tropical waters that might be brewing in the Pacific – have proven capable of flooding parts of Newport, and they’ve grown in intensity in recent decades.

“Coastal flooding is a much more important consideration today than sea-level rise,” said UCI’s Sanders.

“But for the purpose of planning you always think about 30 years into the future. That is where we think about, ‘Well, sea level is changing.’”

HAZARD SCHOLARS

The UCI project’s two-pronged approach involves a team of 22 “hazard scholars,” most of them undergraduates. Locally, they’ve been fanning out across flood-prone parts of Newport, such as the Balboa Peninsula and Lido Isle.

They knock on doors, and each resident willing to answer their survey questions is assigned an identification number.

The residents are shown a map of future flood zones in their part of the city, and, with a tablet that transmits the information to UCI researchers, they answer questions about whether their awareness has been changed at all by seeing the hazard map.

This fall, a survey group in Tijuana that is partnering with UCI will conduct similar surveys.

“We’re doing a randomized, door-to-door survey about flood-risk perception and experience,” said Abby Reyes, director of UCI’s Sustainability Initiative and a co-principal investigator on the FloodRISE project.

One of the hazard scholars is 21-year-old Tristan Lanza, a third-year transfer student majoring in urban studies.

Though born in Southern California, Lanza grew up in Belize, where he experienced torrential rains that brought up to 2 feet of flooding to the streets of Belize City – a result, he believes, of poor infrastructure and drainage.

Lanza said the surveyors in Newport so far have contacted about 150 people, more than half of their projected goal.

“It’s been varied,” Lanza said of the reactions he’s heard when people learn flooding in Newport might be a regular feature in a hotter planet. “I’ve come across people who are highly educated about it. But then I’ve also come across students from around the area, or renters for the summer, who have no idea about flooding.”

Many say they think more flood-prone areas should be included on the map, Lanza added.

The other prong of the FloodRISE project involves engineering students developing the high-precision computer models of future flooding for Newport and Tijuana.

That part of the project is more difficult in Tijuana, where record keeping hasn’t always tracked specific rainfall totals or the movement of water over time. “Modeling that site is way more tricky than Newport,” Lanza said.

Likewise, the survey work in Tijuana promises to be challenging as well.

“People in our other site in Tijuana are often living in precarious situations,” Matthew said. “Many of them had direct experience of flooding, but they may be on the border of legality in terms of their rights to (live) where they are. They have other types of concerns about people coming in and collecting data, other types of anxieties, fears and worries.”

Leifer, the 79-year-old Newport Beach resident, believes the FloodRISE project is important if it can spur action now to get ready for rising seas in the decades to come.

“At my age, I don’t expect to see flooding in the ground floor of my house,” he said. “It’s not that immediate. But it is a cause for concern.”

Contact the writer: 714-796-7865 or pbrennan@ocregister.com.