The adoption and utilization of natural infrastructure (NI) by local governments is crucial for coastal protection from flooding and yet implementation in communities remains challenging as…

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration awarded Utah State University a cooperative agreement totaling $343,331 on June 1, 2026, under the Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research Coastal Ocean Program (CFDA 11.478) to develop governance structures, empirical ecological data, and risk modeling frameworks that support local adoption of natural infrastructure for coastal flood protection.

Utah State University will conduct interdisciplinary research integrating natural sciences, spatial analytics, economics, and engineering to address barriers to natural infrastructure implementation by communities. The work applies across three participating communities along the North Carolina coast and includes development of community governance structures through stakeholder and community surveys, workshops, and semi-structured interviews; quantification of environmental factors that enhance or constrain natural infrastructure implementation; and design of site-specific natural infrastructure solutions. The research responds to challenges in coastal flood preparedness, where practitioners often lack the governance structures, policy frameworks, and empirical evidence needed to adopt natural infrastructure over conventional hazard responses.

Performance occurs in Logan, Utah, with a period of performance from June 1, 2026, through May 31, 2030. The award is structured as a multi-year cooperative agreement under NOAA's Competitive Research Program, which funds peer-reviewed collaborative research producing actionable science to support coastal management and policy decisions.

The adoption and utilization of natural infrastructure (NI) by local governments is crucial for coastal protection from flooding and yet implementation in communities remains challenging as practitioners often lack the governance structures necessary. Limited detailed information about the effectiveness of NI strategies and practices make IT difficult to implement suitable policies or to enact incentive programs that favor them. Without proven advantages IT will be difficult to change permitting systems as needed, better inform engineering design or conduct the proper site selection needed to enhance and encourage NI over conventional coastal hazard responses. Whereas most past studies deal separately with stakeholder perceptions or with physical modeling, our proposal and team is highly interdisciplinary, integrating natural sciences, spatial analytics, economics, and engineering expertise and thus provide an innovative CO-produced and CO-managed approach to support community flood preparedness through NI implementation. Our work addresses the key question: how can we integrate collaborative structures, empirical ecological data, and modeled risk scenarios to support the use of ecologically and economically appropriate risk reducing NI by communities? We will apply our research in three communities along the north carolina (NC) coast that are participating in an ongoing state program facilitating community-driven coastal hazard protection. NC has experienced high rates of flooding, is subject to frequent and intense storm events, and has strong state support for coastal NI. Our team will develop an in-depth understanding of different communities and their support of NI to address flooding through stakeholder and community surveys, workshops, and semi-structured interviews (OBJ. 1). We will quantify the environmental factors that can enhance or constrain implementation of NI and use this information to develop NI designs for specific community selected sites (OBJ. 2). We will work with existing statistical techniques to create a large synthetic data set of physically consistent sea states and associated probabilities under present-day conditions (OBJ. 3). This information will then inform 2-D coupled hydrodynamic and wave models to create site-scale hazard data describing current coastal risk and NI performance metrics and the evolution of risk (OBJ. 4). The project outcomes include: O1: improved knowledge by community members, practitioners and policy makers of the performance of NI under varying local flooding scenarios in coastal NC; O2: integration of institutional, economic, ecological, and engineering considerations that will assist in evaluating the design, implementation and management of NI projects to mitigate effects of coastal flooding; O3: improvements to community flood preparedness plans and to state-selection criteria for prioritizing and funding community-proposed NI projects that are robust in the face of coastal flooding impacts. These outcomes are expected to be transferable to other coastal regions.