Scoping Flood Adaptation Strategies with Crisfield

Project Overview

The Nature Conservancy is partnering with the community of Crisfield and researchers from George Mason University (GMU) and the University of Maryland's Environmental Finance Center (EFC) to bring flood adaptation support to Crisfield, Maryland. We recognize that flooding presents an enormous challenge for the Crisfield community, and is increasingly limiting Crisfield's potential and threatens the overall health of the community. We also recognize that as a rural municipality with constrained resources, the City has limited capacity to plan for future flooding challenges as tidal flooding and storms worsen. 

To address these changes, we are working to identify flood adaptation strategies that support the social and financial health of the community.

With funding from NOAA's Adaptation Science Program and Lockheed Martin, we will be leading a two-year project to collaboratively scope a set of community-backed flood resilient adaptation projects and planning strategies. Our goal is to provide City decision-makers with recommended adaptation approaches that support ongoing flood mitigation and planning efforts while also lifting up the community's resilience goals.

Our project team will be bringing coastal modeling expertise and economic assessment tools to evaluate the feasibility, sustainability and community benefits of various flood adaptation options under different flooding scenarios to help identify a suite of resilient flood adaptation strategies for Crisfield. We will also explore financing and policy options to implement recommended strategies. But our project's success hinges on guidance and input from leaders in the community to ensure that what we evaluate and ultimately recommend supports community resilience needs and goals in the face of ongoing and future flooding challenges.  

Community Collaboration: Community Advisory Committee

The project research team has recruited a small group of grassroots leaders to serve on a Community Advisory Committee (CAC) to collaboratively carry out an assessment of flood adaptation in Crisfield.

The CAC's primary role is to serve as the local subject matter experts for on-the-ground conditions and experiences throughout the Crisfield community. Therefore, the role of the CAC is to bring local expertise and knowledge into the project assessment, and to represent the interests of the community in the project more broadly.

Specifically, the CAC will help the research team: 

• Identify project focus areas;
• Select a suite of adaptation options (e.g., green and/or grey infrastructure projects, nature-based solutions, adaptive planning strategies) for the research team to evaluate;
• Select storm event examples to incorporate into modeled flood scenarios that are relevant to the community; 
• Scope representative flood cost figures to inform the assessment;
• Provide feedback on processes, communications and project outputs;
• Assist in the prioritization of recommendations to local governments and other community decisions-makers.

We are grateful to have the guidance of these trusted community leaders and advocates and look forward to working with our community partners to identify feasible, sustainable and supportive adaptation options for Crisfield.

Project Resources

• Community Advisory Committee Charter: a living document to establish shared agreement on the committee members' roles, responsibilities and working relationship with the project research team.
  
• June 4th Kick-off Meeting Summary Notes: overview of presentations, group discussions and focus area mapping exercise.
• June 4th Kick-off Meeting Presentation Slides