Abstract

Coastal communities across the Gulf of Mexico are increasingly vulnerable to coastal hazards; sea level rise (SLR) and coastal development add to these impacts.  The gulf-wide loss of natural buffers, such as oyster reefs and wetlands furthers the risks.  Despite a growing awareness of SLR and other coastal hazards, local decision makers lack the tools to understand, assess and reduce their socio-economic and ecological vulnerability. 

To support decisions to reduce losses and vulnerability, we propose to expand our successful partnership around Coastal Resilience in the Gulf of Mexico and engage local communities in two critical estuaries:  Galveston Bay, TX and Charlotte Harbor, FL.  Coastal Resilience is a framework that combines spatial information on socio-economic and ecological vulnerability to SLR and other coastal hazards.  We use Coastal Resilience to work directly with communities to evaluate vulnerability and then to identify option to reduce it.  We explore traditional options such as shoreline hardening and ecosystem-based adaptation options such as living shorelines.  The work is innovative because we provide communities with tools needed to jointly assess ecological and socio-economic vulnerability and find solutions to reduce future coastal losses, both human and natural.  These approaches are desperately needed in the Gulf where the resources at risk from coastal hazards are great.

This work builds on our direct experience in developing decision support in the Gulf of Mexico and Long Island Sound and engaging with local communities.  It also leverages our experience running sea level rise and marsh models in these estuaries.  It expands on our Digital Coast partnership to work collaboratively in developing tools (e.g., SLR Viewer) and engaging communities.  In the project time frame, our desired outcomes include the development of an effective decision support tool and its use by communities around two large estuaries in planning to reduce coastal losses.

Objectives

We have six specific project objectives:

1. To develop new locally-relevant and transferable spatial data characterizing natural resource and human community vulnerability;
2. To combine web mapping services and data from NOAA-Coastal Services Center’s SLR Viewer with regional information from the Gulf of Mexico Coastal Resilience tool;
3. To design and build site-specific web application modules for Galveston Bay, TX, and Charlotte Harbor, FL in Coastal Resilience, that accommodate the locally-relevant information and are available for “offline” analyses within their local planning departments;
4. To characterize relationships between social, economic, and ecological planning data with SLR Viewer web services and data to identify vulnerable coastal communities and spatially-explicit adaptation solutions;
5. To apply the information and decision support platform to local community stakeholder workshops in partnership with local communities, the American Planning Association (APA), and the Association for State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM);
6. To transfer methods and lessons learned from these case studies to the development of Coastal Resilience Gulf-wide and to inform engagement with other communities.

Methodology

To support decisions to reduce losses and vulnerability, we propose to expand our successful partnership around Coastal Resilience in the Gulf of Mexico and engage local communities in two critical estuaries: Galveston Bay, TX and Charlotte Harbor, FL.  Coastal Resilience is a framework that combines spatial information on socio-economic and ecological vulnerability to SLR and other coastal hazards.  We use Coastal Resilience to work directly with communities to evaluate vulnerability and then to identify options to reduce it.  We explore traditional options such as shoreline hardening and ecosystem-based adaptation options such as living shorelines. The work is innovative because we provide communities with the tools needed to jointly assess ecological and socio-economic vulnerability and find solutions to reduce future coastal losses, both human and natural. These approaches are desperately needed in the Gulf where the resources at risk from coastal hazards are great.

Although there is a growing interest in mapping SLR, few projects bring this information to bear on local planning processes.  By directly relating coastal hazard information, such as the data found in NOAA’s SLR Viewer, with additional ecological, socioeconomic, and local planning data in our two proposed pilot communities, decision-makers will be able to visualize potential vulnerabilities and at-risk human and natural communities.  This will help them to identify potential adaptation solutions that foster resilient communities.  Our project objectives will be met through the following key activities in collaboration with project partners and stakeholders: 1) data acquisition, analysis, synthesis, and presentation; 2) technological innovation and customization of the Coastal Resilience tool; and 3) stakeholder engagement and outreach.

Rationale

Coastal communities across the Gulf of Mexico are increasingly vulnerable to coastal hazards including sea level rise.  The Gulf of Mexico contains 20,000 km² of land below 1.5 meters in elevation and is one of the most vulnerable regions to sea-level rise in the continental U.S.  Local planners and property owners have generally not decided how they will act in response to sea level rise nor have they mapped future shoreline management strategies to address SLR.  These changes threaten not only the human-built infrastructure and coastal communities but also natural habitats and ecosystems.  The Gulf of Mexico is economically and ecologically one of the most productive bodies of water on earth. Its coastal habitats are diverse and abundant.  The salt marshes and the seagrass meadows in the Gulf of Mexico are of national significance and the oyster reefs are of global significance.  All of these coastal habitats have been lost at alarming rates. These habitats generate valued coastal ecosystem services, which a growing body of evidence suggests can often provide more cost-effective, long-term responses to these hazards than hard engineering solutions. 

Decision-makers need this critical information to support choices for managing human and natural communities in the face of the coastal changes that are underway. Despite a growing awareness of the reality of global climate change and sea level rise, local decision makers often lack the tools to visualize future scenarios and identify alternatives for effective management. As a consequence, they are unable to comprehensively integrate SLR and coastal hazard risk into their decision-making to reduce vulnerability while simultaneously increasing the resilience of human and natural communities.

We will actively address four of the six research priorities identified by NOAA in the Sea Level Rise Tool RFP including development of new data to characterize local vulnerabilities and impacts of SLR; local implementation of SLR tools; examination of socioeconomic costs and benefits of adaptation options; an educational/training resource for local officials.

We focus on the communities in Galveston Bay and Charlotte Harbor because they have relatively high coastal population centers, and they are extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels.  Extensive community engagement has been a key principle in the development of Coastal Resilience. The project team and collaborators have hosted multiple stakeholder workshops in Texas, Mississippi and Florida to better understand community readiness, resources at risk, and the planning support required to avert these impacts.  The proposed project builds off of a highly functional team of collaborators who represent coastal managers and planners, universities, agencies, and non-governmental partners (NGOs) including the University of Southern Mississippi, The Nature Conservancy, Association of State Floodplain Managers, and the American Planning Association. 

Based on the project team’s work to date in Long Island Sound and the Gulf of Mexico, we expect Coastal Resilience to be used by local and state agencies, elected officials, universities, emergency management officials, natural resource managers, and community groups to inform decision-making regarding natural resources and community land use/policy planning, and many of these key stakeholders have already expressed that they would directly use the results of the proposed project.