Cities and counties along the Gulf Coast have experienced increased climate impacts, such as extreme rainfall events associated with flooding and longer duration and intensity of heat waves. These trends are expected to continue. Coastal communities also face increased risks from more intense hurricanes, related storm surge, and inundation from sea-level rise. Many cities and counties within the region have limited resources and lack of access to relevant and actionable climate information, which impedes them from implementing hazard- and climate-related adaptation actions to increase their resilience.
To address this need, the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments (GLISA) NOAA CAP/RISA Team, SCIPP, and other project partners developed a Research to Action Project that helps Gulf Coast communities with their planning to improve resilience. The project worked with nearly 60 coastal communities to use a stormwater vulnerability assessment tool to identify risks related to extreme precipitation and flooding and localized vulnerabilities associated with varying socio-economic characteristics across their jurisdictions. These communities are typically ones with populations of fewer than 200,000 people. Participating communities were divided into three cohorts: in-person engagement, online engagement, and self-directed. The project examined the efficacy of different engagement methodologies to determine optimal ways for engaging with communities in the future that will lower transaction costs, such as time, effort, and consulting fees.
The project team included two NOAA RISA teams – GLISA and SCIPP – along with Stanford University, Headwaters Economics, and Adaptation International. Funding was provided by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Gulf Research Program, and leveraged expertise from the two RISA teams and other partners. In addition to studying engagement methodologies, the project team examined how participating locations’ adaptive capacity informed their plans and abilities to implement mitigation measures and how boundary organizations can improve the recruitment process.
Each participating team received access to an online vulnerability assessment tool (developed by GLISA with previous support from NOAA SARP), localized climate assessments (developed by SCIPP), and relevant socio-economic data (provided by Headwaters Economics). Previous work by GLISA suggests that in addition to developing profiles of stormwater risks, cities and counties can use the data and tool for other outcomes, such as updating land use plans, zoning ordinances, communicating about climate risks, and developing public health initiatives.
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