Coastal areas are increasingly vulnerable to climate change impacts of storm surge flooding, erosion, and sea level rise. Patterns of urban development in low-lying coastal areas create critical demand for new strategies to achieve greater climate resilience that manages landscape processes while benefitting people. Advancing resiliency and stewardship of urbanized coastal areas requires critical involvement from ecologists and research embedded into design and planning. Coastal cities and towns, like New Orleans, with their heavily populated, low-lying waterfront settlements, are ideal sites for exploring climate change adaptation strategies that incorporate management for wetland hydrology, deposition and erosion and other critical functions. Indeed, adaptation efforts are underway, though they face many obstacles. These include limited financial resources and restricted regulatory powers of local governments. Locally, the distribution of risks is uneven and so is the understanding of adaptation options and impacts. In addition, differing values across experts, institutions, and decision-makers make negotiating solutions challenging. Local governments must protect local environments and vulnerable populations while remaining accountable to both their tax base and state and federal authorities. Understanding ecosystem dynamics and incorporating this information into land use choices are rare at the municipal administrative level and are further complicated when combined with patterns of land-use change through urban development. Nevertheless, coastal cities and towns need to make decisions about how to implement adaptation strategies; otherwise, they will suffer the growing consequences of inaction. Ecologists can play an important role in contributing ecological understanding and research methods to help guide implementation projects. This symposium brings together an interdisciplinary group of coastal and wetland ecologists, land planners, landscape architects, and policymakers to discuss the strategies and challenges of land development for climate change adaptation of coastal systems. The presenters tie the work they are doing with the potential roles ecologists can and are playing in coastal resilience including a focus on New Orleans. The methods and strategies presented and developed are intended to improve the understanding of the role of ecological, social, and infrastructural approaches to redesign coastal urban systems.