Miami-Dade County Takes Steps Towards Climate Resilience

Shoreline Resilience Working Group field trip taken at a living shoreline project at Oleta River State Park in Miami-Dade County (Photo courtesy of Chris Bergh/The Nature Conservancy)

Florida is considered one of the most vulnerable and at-risk states to sea level rise, tropical storms, and variations in precipitation levels. In fact, just weeks before Hurricane Matthew made landfall as a Category 1 Hurricane, Miami-Dade County released a memorandum along with a series of reports that linked to the implementation of seven resolutions recommended by the county’s Sea Level Rise Task Force. Actions within these resolutions are explicitly linked to the work that the County has been engaging in with The Nature Conservancy and other NGOs, as well as local universities, federal agencies, and other organizations to adapt to anticipated impacts of climate change. TNC partnered with the County on a series of studies around flood risk reduction and water management. These studies employed modelling tools to analyze the effectiveness of natural barriers and flood protection measures along the coastline to develop rules for pre-storm operation.

TNC has played a significant role in examining how future adaptation options such as nature-based solutions can enhance ecological restoration within several of the resolutions passed to address climate change impacts. The benefits of nature-based defenses are visualized on TNC’s Coastal Resilience tool, where the County and partners are able to visualize the effectiveness of nature-based coastal protection approaches, the potential impacts of sea level rise, location of critical erosion areas, areas with concentrations of repetitive loss properties, on-going and completed Miami-Dade County Shoreline projects, and existing land use and flood zones in a series of web-based apps. Coastal Resilience has and will continue to play a valuable role in the County’s land use planning and decision making as they prepare their community for more storms to come.

To learn more about this work in Southeast Florida, see this article.