June 1 is the official opening of hurricane season for the Atlantic coast of the United States. But for the millions of families that call southeastern Florida home, they don’t need a date on a calendar to remind them of the threats. Miami frequently tops the list as one of the world’s most vulnerable metropolitan areas with the most to lose from hurricanes, sea-level rise and flooding.
In a recent interview, Curt Smith, Director of Planning for Accomack-County Planning District Commission (A-NPDC) spoke about how A-NPDC is using the Coastal Resilience tool to plan for rising seas and coastal flooding.
Following the public release of the Virginia Eastern Shore Coastal Resilience online decision mapping tool in February 2016, two training workshops were hosted at the Eastern Shore Community College in Melfa, Virginia to introduce the tool to local planners and decision-makers. The workshops were focused primarily on helping participants build skills to use the overall web mapper functions with special emphasis on the learning how to use the Flood & Sea Level Rise app and the Future Habitat app in planning contexts. Forty members of the community were trained in how to use and apply the tool for adaptation and resilience issues over the course of the two workshops. The next round of trainings will be offered in the fall of 2016 once additional apps are released.
North Carolina’s Community Rating System Explorer (CRS Explorer) assists a community by combining local data with high level mapping tools and calculations to help the community utilize the National Flood Insurance Program’s (NFIP) Community Rating System (CRS).
An innovative app is helping enhance habitat resilience for beach-nesting shorebirds in the face of sea-level rise.