National Coastal Protection Study

Sea level rise and storm surge are immediate threats to coastal infrastructure across the United States. While this threat has been well documented, the scale of the threat in terms of the cost to protect coastal infrastructure was missing on a national scale. This study was intended to fill this gap by setting a baseline cost for protecting the coast and determining the length of protection required.

Resilient Analytics was the consultant in this effort to determine the local and national costs of protecting coastal infrastructure. The team was tasked with delivering adaptation costs for each city and state along the lower 48 states. This included determining a baseline protection strategy, a coastal and inland protection schema and a methodology to determine where protection was required.

Resilient Analytics developed analytics to determine where protection was required along the coastline and what type of protections would be appropriate. Utilizing its unique ability to study large asset inventories, Resilient Analytics modeled each section of projected inundation to determine the length and cost of protection. This ultimately resulted in a $400 billion cost and 53,000 miles of required seawalls.