Preparing for Change

INVESTING IN OUR CITY

As ecologists, landscape architects, architects, and engineers with applied experience with shoreline protection projects around the world, we offer this document as a response to the US Army Corps of Engineers’ recent Charleston Peninsula Coastal Flood Risk Management Study. In considering our comments on the Study, we realized that some concepts that should be central to the conversation might be unfamiliar to some of our fellow citizens.

Therefore, we decided to build on the study’s solid technical foundation for protecting Charleston from storm surge by creating a kit-of-parts with visual support to encourage conversation around durable, city-strengthening designs.

Our firms are part of a national movement towards nature-based designs, which combine hard engineering and traditional materials like concrete and steel with ecological forms such as marshes and oyster reefs. The combination offers redundancy of combined approaches, reduced maintenance costs, and living systems that can respond dynamically to future conditions. Nature-based designs can also offer co-benefits that enhance the community and the surrounding environment.