Study offers coastal communities better way to prepare for devastating storms

With massive coastal storms on the rise, a new study describes a method for stakeholders in vulnerable communities to be involved in preparing for, absorbing, recovering and adapting from devastation.

Recognizing that a methodology was missing for integrating coastal stakeholders into the process of identifying and selecting of resilience-enhancing projects, the authors conducted a case study with data from a stakeholder meeting in Mobile Bay, Alabama, to demonstrate a method for engaging stakeholders over a longer period to identify what the group considered the community's most significant critical functions and project initiatives to preserve those functions under different scenarios. 

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In reviewing the workshop results, the authors note that their study does not seek to measure whether a community or a coastline is resilient or not because there "is clearly no agreement on how this would be accomplished." However, the methodology offers stakeholders an opportunity to understand the concept of resilience and scenarios and, based on this understanding, to make informed choices on how to improve the coastal resilience in their community. "This is a capability that does not currently exist," the authors write.