Natural Infrastructure Metrics Workgroup: Framework, Metrics, and Suggestions for Agencies and Academics to Measure Coastal Resilience Performance and Effectiveness

Hurricanes Katrina (2005) and Sandy (2012) demonstrated the power of extreme weather events to exacerbate and inflict major physical and economic damages on coastal ecosystems and communities. Paradoxically, these major storm events also showed that under certain circumstances, damages to communities may be mitigated by natural systems and infrastructure such as dunes, oyster reefs, and wetlands. Many government agencies and other organizations have differing, sometimes conflicting, roles and authorities along the coastline related to managing ecosystems and natural infrastructure. For natural infrastructure to be effectively employed as a major component of a resilient coastal strategy, these differences need to be explored and resolved. The Natural Infrastructure Metrics (NIM) workgroup was established with a variety of industries and expertise to address a central challenge to implementing natural infrastructure options: the lack of a widely accepted set of metrics that could be used to evaluate the performance and benefits of these approaches.Three criteria are at the foundation of these natural infrastructure metrics, (1) Performance of the solution to reduce the specific hazard or objective being addressed; (2) benefits in addition to the performance, which encourage agencies to collect information during their monitoring not typically within their mission but will help to further the field; and (3) implementation and monitoring using the core natural infrastructure metrics and compiled protocols available in the report. This presentation will provide an overview of the final report and metrics, cost analysis suggesting monitoring is effective compared to total implementation costs, and recommendations for how to mainstream metric collection and assess the effectiveness of natural infrastructure in the near future.