Coastal communities are increasingly at risk of flooding from both storms and heavy rain, threatening homes, economies, and ways of life. We are developing an adaptive planning framework that integrates natural and built infrastructure as multiple lines of defense, both at the shoreline and inland. Our research will provide decision-makers in coastal Virginia with tools and information to better evaluate long-term coastal planning options.
Why We Care
Flooding is one of the most costly and disruptive natural hazards facing coastal communities in the United States. In places like Norfolk, Hampton, and the rural shores of Virginia’s Middle Peninsula and Eastern Shore, flooding causes recurring damage to homes, businesses, and critical infrastructure, and threatens the long-term viability of communities. The economic toll is significant, but the human toll runs deeper. Flooding displaces families, disrupts livelihoods, strains emergency services, and erodes communities that have existed in these regions for generations.
Storms are intensifying while sea levels rise; floods that were once rare are becoming routine. For communities on the front lines, the damage is real. It does not matter whether water comes from the ocean, from heavy rainfall, or from both at once. Yet most planning frameworks treat these flood sources separately, leaving communities exposed to the combined risk that is increasingly the norm rather than the exception.
Current approaches to flood planning have other critical gaps as well. They rely heavily on rigid, gray infrastructure like seawalls, levees, and drainage pipes, designed around static assumptions about the future. The reality is that the future is deeply uncertain. We do not know exactly how storms will intensify, how quickly sea levels will rise, or how precipitation patterns will shift. Planning frameworks that ignore this uncertainty lead to infrastructure decisions that are either over-built and wasteful or under-built and insufficient.
At the same time, current approaches evaluate infrastructure options almost entirely on construction cost and flood damage reduction, overlooking the significant additional value that natural infrastructure can provide. Marshes, oyster reefs, and living shorelines do not just buffer communities from flooding. They improve water quality, restore habitats, support fisheries, store carbon, and create recreational opportunities that benefit communities economically and socially. When these co-benefits go unaccounted for, natural infrastructure is consistently undervalued, and communities miss out on solutions that could serve them in multiple ways simultaneously.
This project asks: how can we create a more flexible, systematic planning approach for reducing flood risk in coastal areas that accounts for the complexity of compound flooding, embraces uncertainty, captures the full value of natural infrastructure, and leads to more robust and locally relevant solutions?
What We Are Doing
We are developing an innovative and integrated framework for coastal infrastructure planning in three regions of coastal Virginia — Hampton Roads, Middle Peninsula, and Eastern Shore. These regions represent a wide range of conditions, from densely populated urban areas like Norfolk and Hampton to rural communities on the Middle Peninsula and Eastern Shore, each facing flooding challenges with very different resources, governance structures, and environmental contexts. This variety allows us to develop approaches that can be adapted and transferred to coastal communities across the country.
Our work is organized around three core efforts:
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- An adaptive planning framework: We are developing a dynamic and adaptive planning framework that does not assume a single fixed future. Instead, it continuously incorporates new information about flood drivers and adjusts infrastructure recommendations over time. This means communities can take near-term actions with lower uncertainty while preserving flexibility to adapt as conditions evolve and uncertainty reduces;
- A collective coastal defense strategy: We are investigating how natural infrastructure at the shoreline and inland can work together with traditional hard infrastructure as multiple, integrated lines of defense against compound flooding. Specifically, our framework identifies how these options complement each other and how communities can deploy them strategically across the landscape;
- A comprehensive valuation of natural infrastructure co-benefits: We are developing methods to quantify what natural infrastructure provides beyond flood protection, including water quality improvement, habitat restoration, carbon storage, and recreational value. This gives decision-makers a more complete picture when evaluating and comparing infrastructure options.
We are working with key stakeholders and prospective end users of the project outputs, including the City of Norfolk, City of Hampton, Accomack-Northampton Planning District Commission, Middle Peninsula Planning District Commission, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, through a Management Transition Advisory Group to co-develop practical infrastructure options and ensure the work directly supports local decision-making. As part of this effort, we are building a decision-support tool that allows stakeholders to explore alternative infrastructure scenarios, compare options across multiple objectives, and run what-if analyses under different future conditions. This tool is designed to be practical and accessible, built in direct collaboration with the decision-makers that will use it.
Benefits of Our Work
The ultimate goal of this project is to help coastal communities become more resilient in the face of growing flood risk. Beyond the immediate study regions, our work will:
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- Provide a transferable framework that can inform flood planning in coastal communities across the country, not just in Virginia;
- Strengthen the scientific and practical case for investing in natural infrastructure by demonstrating its full value beyond flood protection;
- Equip communities with the tools and evidence they need to compete for state and federal funding to implement flood resilience strategies;
- Inform policy by demonstrating how adaptive, multi-objective planning approaches can be incorporated into mainstream infrastructure decision-making; and
- Support the long-term vitality of coastal communities by helping them make infrastructure investments that serve multiple needs simultaneously.
This project is led by Majid Shafiee-Jood at the University of Virginia, in collaboration with Negin Alemazkoor, Jonathan Goodall, Julianne Quinn, and Patricia Wiberg at the University of Virginia; Laura Costadone, Trang Thu Le, Jessica Whitehead, and Wie Yusuf at Old Dominion University; and Navid Tahvildari at Florida International University, and is funded by the NCCOS Effects of Sea Level Rise (ESLR) Program.