Coastal communities are facing the dual threat of increasing flood risk from coastal flooding and more intense precipitation

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration awarded the University of Virginia a $399,853 cooperative agreement on June 1, 2026, under the Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research Coastal Ocean Program (CFDA 11.478) to develop an adaptive planning framework for managing compound coastal and precipitation flooding in three regions of coastal Virginia: Hampton Roads, Middle Peninsula, and Eastern Shore.

The project delivers a dynamic, uncertainty-aware infrastructure planning framework that integrates natural infrastructure and hardened structures as complementary coastal defense mechanisms, with comprehensive assessment of co-benefits from nature-based solutions. The research team spans decision science, stakeholder engagement, uncertainty quantification, multi-objective optimization, hydrologic and stormwater modeling, coastal engineering, and hydrodynamic modeling disciplines. Performance occurs in Charlottesville, Virginia, with a period of performance through May 31, 2030.

The University of Virginia passes funding to two sub-recipients. Old Dominion University Research Foundation received a sub-award on July 20, 2026, to support stakeholder engagement activities and co-investigator participation from four faculty members who will lead stakeholder workshops across the three study regions, manage the project's Management and Technical Advisory Group, and conduct quantification of stakeholder preferences and ecological co-benefits assessment of flood mitigation strategies. Florida International University received a sub-award on June 16, 2026, to develop hydrodynamic simulations of compound flooding using Delft3D modeling across varying resolution scales, from the U.S. East Coast through possible Gulf coverage, and to evaluate efficiency of nature-based and green infrastructure solutions under different scenarios informed by the Management and Technical Advisory Group.

As historically extreme events become routine, floods pose increasingly greater risks to communities. While some of the impacts will be common across urban and coastal areas, the consequences could differ substantially. To counter the effects of flooding, coastal localities, mainly in urban areas, have made major infrastructure investments. However, in most cases, these investments have been guided by traditional engineering methods that (1) heavily rely on grey or hardened structures; (2) ignore the compound risk of coastal and pluvial flooding in coastal communities; (3) fail to properly account for uncertainty; (4) use simplistic benefit-cost analysis that focuses narrowly on flood damage reduction; and (5) lack an effective CO-production approach. To address the gaps highlighted above, this project proposes an innovative and integrated planning framework for coastal infrastructure planning under uncertainty. Unique aspects of our project include: 1) developing a novel dynamic and adaptive planning framework that takes into account uncertainty and produces a different sequence of management decisions under different realizations; 2) investigating the complementary role of natural and hard infrastructure both at the shoreline and inland as a collective coastal defense mechanism; 3) providing a comprehensive assessment and quantification of the CO-benefits of natural infrastructure. Our team brings together experts from different disciplines including decision science, stakeholder engagement, uncertainty quantification, multi-objective optimization and control, hydrologic/stormwater modeling, and coastal engineering and hydrodynamic modeling. Our modeling efforts will focus on case studies in three regions in coastal virginia, namely, hampton roads, middle peninsula, and eastern shore of virginia. Leveraging our previous and ongoing collaborations with stakeholders in these regions, we will form a management transition advisory group composed of key stakeholders and prospective end-users of the project outputs (e.g., city of norfolk, city of hampton, accomack-northampton planning district commission middle peninsula planning district commission, US army corps of engineers) to increase the relevance and utility of our research outputs. Specifically, through a series of engagement activities, we will CO-generate favorable infrastructure options as well as appropriate objective functions. Our adaptive planning framework will use hydrologic simulation models of overland flooding that receive the water level from storm tide hydrodynamic models at the shoreline for different storm surge and coastal flooding scenarios as a boundary condition. We will couple this simulation modeling framework with a reinforcement learning algorithm that determines the optimal locations to add inland grey/green infrastructure and natural infrastructure along the shoreline using a multi-objective optimization framework.