Coastal Resilience and Natural Solutions Toolkits

The Nature Conservancy

Identifying nature-based solutions for coastal communities. To help community planners and decision makers implement projects for hazard mitigation, climate adaptation, and conservation planning, The Nature Conservancy created the Coastal Resilience tool. Developed in 2007 through a public-private partnership, the tool supports the planning process for flood-risk reduction projects with natural and nature-based features. After more than a decade of success, the conservancy used the tool to create the new Natural Solutions Toolkit, or NST: a suite of web-mapping decision support tools for conservation and climate adaptation across marine, freshwater-floodplain, and urban environments spanning from local to global scales. With a portfolio of 100 custom applications across 26 geographies, the NST allows a diverse user base to visualize and assess climate hazards alongside social, economic, and ecological assets. Already, the NST has guided the implementation of more than two dozen restoration and conservation projects around the world—more than 100 communities, public agencies, and stakeholders across 11 countries. From coral reefs in the Caribbean to nature-based solutions in New Jersey, the NST provides a decision-making support system for coasts, oceans, floodplains, and urban environments.

Above: The concept of living shorelines explained.

(Images by The Nature Conservancy)

The Living Shoreline Explorer web application is part of the Coastal Resilience–Virginia Eastern Shore decision-support platform, which helps planners identify and prioritize where nature-based shoreline enhancement techniques might help reduce coastal marsh loss and sediment erosion.

(Image by The Nature Conservancy)

Volunteers building oyster castles as part of a living shoreline project in coastal Virginia.

(Photo by Gwynn Crichton, The Nature Conservancy)

Planners in Virginia use the Coastal Resilience decision support tool to better understand their community’s risk and identify nature-based solutions to reduce that risk and make them more resilient to future climate change.

(photo by Gwynn Crichton, The Nature Conservancy)

Coastal Resilience logo.