Building Coastal Resilience

After a disaster, there is a strong tension between the urge to return to normal and the desire to transform communities to be more resilient.

Public officials and planners are compelled to make decisions about rebuilding at a time when they are under intense pressure and scrutiny. However, failure to make decisions based on a collaborative, deliberative approach can result in short-term solutions that often exacerbate vulnerabilities and that do not optimize the use of limited recovery resources.

Recognizing this tension in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Regional Plan Association (RPA) launched a scenario planning effort to help municipalities make reconstruction decisions that anticipate future conditions and build more resilient communities. This report provides a framework to help inform recovery and rebuilding decisions so that they advance regional coastal adaptation and strengthen local capacity and community resilience.

Scenario planning is a decision-support tool that incorporates the best available information and key uncertainties into multiple stories of the future. These scenarios can help decision-makers frame and evaluate response options according to desired outcomes, such as livability, flood safety or resilience. We use scenario planning because this process addresses uncertainty about future conditions at the forefront of decision-making processes. Additionally, it brings together stakeholders and decision-makers to understand these uncertainties and to create alignment on future goals and actions. Unlike long-range planning or forecasting, scenario planning allows us to consider and prepare for anomalous events such as extreme coastal storms.

There are many tools to reduce vulnerability to the impacts of extreme weather events. Planners can use the scenarios and the scenario planning process outlined in this report as they develop and implement recovery and reconstruction plans or as they create pre-disaster recovery plans for future coastal storms. This report presents four scenarios developed by RPA with input with members of the Joint Climate Committee of the New York-Connecticut and North Jersey Sustainable Communities Consortia. These scenarios can provide a framework for helping local government and other public and private organizations interested in advancing coastal adaptation. The specific scenarios are described in chapter 2. The report makes recommendations for post-storm decisions that prepare for climate impacts. While general in nature, they can serve as guidelines for developing an adaptive and multi-pronged approach to rebuilding.

• The aftermath of a disaster is precisely the worst time—but often the only time—to think comprehensively about climate adaptation. Federal disaster aid in the form of capital and technical assistance can be harnessed to support adaptation goals.
• Communities can only achieve comprehensive risk reduction by using an array of response options. No single tool will be effective against all the hazards and impacts associated with coastal storms.
• There are ​“no regrets” strategies that require low investment, reduce risk and often provide co-benefits. Sometimes these are difficult and politically unpopular solutions in the near-term, but they are robust over multiple scenarios and can lead to flexible adaptation pathways.

The report also provides specific recommendations about how scenario planning might be used to advance climate adaptation.

• Scenario planning is best employed as part of a long-term and forward-thinking planning process, but it can also help planners pivot from recovery to long-term rebuilding.
• It is important to establish the goals of the scenario planning process early. This can help build consensus and define the scope of process and the parameters of the scenarios.
• Build consensus on a set of desired outcomes or on a set of transparent and measurable criteria to help assess response options relative to each other.
• Scenario planning is best used as a platform for creating robust and flexible pathways of response to recover and rebuild from disasters and adapt to future conditions. Scenario planning reflects a response to growing uncertainty. Implementation should similarly follow this adaptive response model.