Coastal Resilience Decision-Support Framework
Features
- Provides multiple climate scenarios of projected sea level rise and storm surge conditions, allowing users to zoom to specific locations in each geography
- Establishes relationships among ecological, social, and economic indicators to provide a comprehensive platform for local and regional decision making
- Recognizes common management objectives and proposes solutions for achieving ecosystem protection and community resilience
Overview
The Coastal Resilience Decision-Support Framework supports decisions to reduce the ecological and socioeconomic risks of coastal hazards. The framework includes four critical elements:
- Raise Awareness – Develop integrated databases on social, economic, and ecological resources critical to communities, and provide mapping and visualization tools
- Assess Risk – With community input, assess risk and vulnerability to coastal hazards, including alternative scenarios for current and future storms and sea level rise
- Identify Choices – Identify choices for reducing vulnerability that focus on joint solutions across social, economic, and ecological systems; provide decision support, including Web-based guidance and scenarios to assess options
- Take Action – Help communities develop and implement solutions
With the interactive decision-support framework, users can visualize future flood risks from sea level rise and storm surge. They can also identify areas and populations at risk and gain a better understanding of ecological, social, and economic impacts from coastal hazards. This information is particularly helpful for officials taking rising sea levels and increased storm intensity and frequency into consideration when making coastal management decisions—such as coastal planning, zoning, and land acquisition. The Coastal Resilience Framework is being advanced in many geographies:
- New York and Connecticut
- Gulf of Mexico
- Florida Keys
- Puget Sound
- Southern California
- U.S. Virgin Islands
This approach is also being applied internationally in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the Meso-American Reef in Central America, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, and Marismas Nacionales in the Gulf of California.