Rebuilding with Resilience

RESILIENCE INTERVENTIONS
The RBD proposals included many similar approaches for increasing the physical resilience of communities and
addressing the water-based threats common to communities in the New York and New Jersey region. This section
describes these approaches (or “resilience interventions”), which include natural and structural flood defenses,
green infrastructure approaches for managing stormwater, and land-use (or “nonstructural”) strategies for ensuring
that public and private development is designed and sited to be more resilient to flooding. This section discusses
the common legal and policy challenges that the grantees are facing as they work to implement these resilience
interventions, and describes opportunities for scaling and replicating these approaches throughout the project
areas, and more broadly across these cities, the region, and beyond.
FLOOD DEFENSES 15
Most of the damage from Sandy resulted from storm surge; consequently, all of the RBD proposals focused, in
one way or another, on interventions to reduce impacts from extreme storms. Sandy brought 12- to 14-foot storm
surges, which overtopped flood defenses, battered beaches and wetlands, and inundated communities up and down
the coast with several feet of floodwaters. This region is also anticipated to see 4 feet or more of additional sea-level
rise over the next century, which will increase flood risks. 16
As a result, all of the winning proposals developed innovative ideas for building “berms with benefits” — flood
control structures that can provide other important everyday environmental, social, and economic benefits:
• The BIG U proposal called for integrating flood protection into a city park and using deployable flood walls
underneath raised highways where space is constrained;
• The Living Breakwaters proposal called for the construction of breakwaters that would double as oyster
reefs to dampen storm surge, enhance marine habitats, and reduce or reverse erosion of beaches; and
• The Living with the Bay proposal called for living shorelines, restored marshlands, and constructed
barrier islands to provide natural defenses to storm surge.
The RBD proposals also often called for combining “gray” structural flood protection devices (such as berms or
breakwaters) with “green” natural and nature-based approaches (such as restoring wetlands) to reduce impacts
from storm surges. “Green” or “natural” defenses refer to approaches that restore, mimic, and enhance natural
coastal features to reduce coastal flooding and erosion risk, including beach nourishment, dune management,
living shorelines, 17 and wetland restoration. Natural defenses are a more ecologically beneficial way of addressing
coastal flood risk compared to traditional “gray” or “structural measures,” 18 which rely on engineered structures
designed to decrease shoreline erosion, dampen wave action, and protect against flooding. Structural measures
include levees, storm surge barriers, sea walls, revetments, groins, and breakwaters.
8 Chapter 1: Summary of Lessons Learned | Rebuilding with Resilience GEORGETOWN CLIMATE CENTER