Coastal adaptation that effectively promotes ecological health requires smart planning, retrofits, and enlightened management. The current trends in development exacerbate risks and escalate the costs of maintaining viable coastlines. At the same time, development patterns contribute to the reduction of coastal ecosystem processes and functions. In the face of risks and uncertainty associated with climate change, coastal communities can scarce afford to continue with business as usual. The challenge for engineers, regulators and ecologists seeking to shape coastal zones is to define an approach that can strike an effective integration of scientific understanding and applications with economic development and urban design. Given the uncertainty and unavoidable compromises necessary for coastal adaptation, we utilize a learning-by-doing approach. It involves site-specific ecosystem analysis and management incorporating models of sea level rise and storm surge, ecological restoration approaches, and creative strategies with infrastructure and urban retrofits. Working closely with a variety of stakeholders from the community, and with regulators and practitioners, we approach the process of adaptation and development through multifunctional strategies that build on engineering, site planning, social awareness and education and foster viable, effective, and proactive coastal development.
Results/Conclusions
The presentation describes an ecologically driven approach to coastal adaptation. This novel approach to redesigning our coastal cities incorporates translational ecology into site planning, with teams of researchers and designers co-investigating and co-designing real world strategies. Multiple actors, ranging from state agencies to regional planners to municipal managers and homeowners, participate in cross-disciplinary projects that integrate experimental research into modeling and planning. Adaptive interventions, designed as ecological experiments and incorporating economic and public health metrics, inform urbanized floodplain decision-making. The translational ecology that we utilize in planning and negotiating, and in implementing adaptation include: (1) to propose contemporary modes of systems thinking, including phasing and designing spatially and temporally to emphasis the ecological and social functions; (2) to develop ways of representing ecological planning approaches to raise awareness across multi-stakeholders in coastal communities and to navigate the regulatory and political challenges; (3) to develop incremental development and adaptive management for negotiating complex challenges to support long-term benefits; (4) to integrate ecological systems into urban coastal development and infrastructure through real world project implementation using designed experiments; (5) to develop methods for re-structuring landscapes to achieve risk reduction and long-term resilience including retrofitting urban floodplains to be more resilient.