to these countries by the promise of new markets or lower-cost supply lines, only to find their competitive edge eroded or completely eliminated when their intellectual property is stolen, copied and replicated at a lower cost.

The current environment leaves ambitious U.S. manufacturers with a difficult choice: expand into new markets and increase their exposure to IP theft, or retreat to a safe, but limited, market and pass up the opportunity for growth.

Manufacturers can safely navigate the waters of international trade and protect their intellectual property

Yet, there is a third choice. Manufacturers can safely navigate the waters of international trade and protect their intellectual property by tracking the flow of information in their companies, accurately assessing and predicting risk factors, and employing effective due diligence when teaming up withhigher and more dangerous than the one it has long known. So-called 500-year floods — freak meteorological events of extreme destructive power, now expected only twice a millennium — will become 100-year floods, and 100-year floods will become 20-year floods.

The specter of rising seas has long been invoked by environmentalists as a kind of warning, to spur action on climate change. But in recent years, a growing chorus of planners and scientists have begun talking about higher sea levels not as some cautionary scenario, but as a fact of life — one that everyone who lives near the ocean, whatever his views on the climate, needs to prepare for.

What does Boston need to do? Architects, city officials, insurers, and engineers have begun to lay the groundwork

for a new