Design for Climate Adaptation

Hazards like coastal storm surges, stormwater flooding, intensifying precipitations, extreme heat, wildfires, and biodiversity loss are threatening communities everywhere. Climate adaptive landscapes can help tackle these challenges. For decades, SCAPE has worked across disciplines, interpreting and leveraging the best available science, translating complex risks into strategies that protect and enrich communities and their landscapes.

The impacts of climate change cross jurisdictional boundaries and plans for a more resilient future must do the same, coordinating multiple voices into a single vision. SCAPE works at the scale of states and regions to help agencies, jurisdictions, and communities strategize, plan, and design together.

On a statewide level, SCAPE has been working for more than eight years with the state of Louisiana on their Coastal Master Plan, which gets revised every six years. This ongoing work validates the idea that adaptation is an ongoing cycle that requires investment in engagement, data collection, modeling, and an understanding that the plans we produce should be viewed as evolving frameworks. Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan embraces this, equipping the state and community members with the tools to face and adapt to land loss and other climate risks.

Nature-based solutions are central to this work and can be deployed at a large scale across regions. Reefs, coastal wetlands, and urban forests reduce risk, restore ecosystem services, support biodiversity, and create places people want to be in. SCAPE's plan for Resilient New Jersey deploys those strategies at a regional scale.

Cities are prime testing grounds for adaptation. Partnering with municipalities, committee boards, and community leaders helps SCAPE understand the unique geographic needs and implementation structures required of a city to develop strategies that are holistic, actionable, and built to last. Sometimes, these conditions vary drastically, like in Jacksonville, the largest city in the U.S. by land area.

Downtown Jacksonville looks nothing like the suburbs or rural landscapes. In Resilient Jacksonville, SCAPE outlined eight development types as an organizing mechanism for adaptation strategies.

Adaptation also demands long-term thinking, defining clear, actionable steps to take today and years in the future. SCAPE works with cities to make long-term plans, like the Resilient Boston Harbor Vision, which stitched neighborhood planning efforts into a connected network of parks along 47 miles of shoreline. Learn more about designing Cities as Habitat.

Some of our most ambitious city-scale work takes a longer view, leveraging natural processes to reimagine what a coastline or watershed could become over decades. In the San Francisco Bay, the Public Sediment project proposed designing with mud itself: harvesting sediment, unlocking tributary channels, and connecting vulnerable neighborhoods to the Bay through civic sensing stations and youth-led environmental monitoring.

In Hayward, California, a joint power authority created a unique framework for collaboration between municipal and regional agencies, opening the door to deeper engagement across a broader coalition of stakeholders. The resulting Hayward Regional Shoreline Adaptation Master Plan emerged from two years of analysis, community engagement, and planning, ultimately charting a proactive course for adapting communities, infrastructure, and ecosystems along the Bay shoreline to sea-level rise and other climate impacts. Unanimously adopted by the City of Hayward in February 2021, the plan ensures that the impacts of climate change, which are most visceral at the neighborhood level, are addressed by centering community voices.

Universities, cultural institutions, and other large landowners face their own adaptation challenges—managing historic landscapes, maintaining long-term operations, and stewarding resources across generations in the face of flooding, wildfires, and extreme heat. SCAPE works alongside institutions to help them think about resilience, future threats, and preserving urban forests.

Climate change is happening quickly and evolving constantly. To keep up, it’s imperative to test new methods, gather real-world data, and ask bigger questions about what adaptation can look like at scale. While some regions experience rain bombs and flash floods, others face extreme heat. Landscapes help mitigate the urban heat island-ification in cities and may be the main strategy to adapt and stay cool.

From individual sites to entire regions, SCAPE is committed to shaping systems of resilience that help cities, communities, and ecosystems thrive in the face of changing climate future.