Can we build climate resilient communities?

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On November 3, Mayor Gavin Buckley of Annapolis formally launched the construction of City Dock, a project many years in the making. Initial construction had already begun, but this ceremony marked the official start of the Annapolis City Dock Resiliency and Revitalization Project.

City Dock’s successful completion is essential to the community’s future. The project includes a raised waterfront park with floodgates and deployable barriers to mitigate storm surge and frequent tidal flooding. It will also provide enhanced public water access, event spaces, and the restoration of a historic landmark. It’s a direct response to the constant flooding that plagues the downtown streets of the historic capital city. With an ultimate cost on the order of $100 million, this ambitious initiative has been central to the mayor’s term in office. In his remarks, Mayor Buckley emphasized City Dock’s role as the “economic engine and centerpiece of Annapolis.”

Back in September, Mayor Buckley participated in a webinar sponsored by Lambda Alpha International, a land economics honorary society, titled “Resiliency around the Globe: Local Responses to Hurricanes, Sea Rise and Sudden Flooding.” Joining him on the panel were Robert Bunting of the Climate Adaptation Center Inc., based in Sarasota, Florida, and Enrique Cabrera, professor of fluid mechanics at the Universität Polytechnica de Valencia, Spain.

Bunting recounted the experience of Sarasota and the wider South Florida region’s experience in 2024, as it was battered by a series of major hurricanes – Debbie, Helene and Milton. The cost in lives, in homes lost and tens of millions in hurricane damages call for rethinking how we build and where we build. He questioned the building or even re-building on the barrier islands along Florida’s Gulf coast.

Mayor Buckley, in his distinctive Australian accent, described the extensive collaborative process that went into the City Dock effort, engaging with many different stakeholders. Perhaps most notable is the neighboring United States Naval Academy, with its own keen interest in protecting its assets from flooding. The mayor also cited the importance of learning from others who have successfully faced these challenges and mentioned missions to the Netherlands as providing valuable insights.

Professor Cabrera comes from the area of Spain that suffered from the sudden and sustained rainfall that devastated the Valencia region in 2024. Over 220 lives were lost, 15,000 residents were displaced and 36,000 required rescues. The economic costs, including long-term effects, may exceed $50 billion. Professor Cabrera noted the engineering dilemma of designing infrastructure for flooding events thought to occur on the rarest of occasions. And, when they do occur, the cost of rebuilding is beyond what private insurance can be expected to recover.

The general sense of the webinar was that, despite decades of warning regarding the impending climate crisis, we as individuals as well as our leaders, both nationally and globally are not willing to take the actions needed to avert the worst effects of a warming planet. And, now that the crisis is upon us, we are forced to make adaptations with enormous price tags.

Perhaps we can look for hope in younger generations. For example. I found some promise in work being conducted by students and faculty involved in PennPraxis, the applied research and practice arm of the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Engaging with local communities, they collaboratively develop tools, strategies, and design interventions aimed at imagining new futures for both urban and rural settings. Their work typically focuses on historically marginalized communities.

One example is their project in Camden, New Jersey, a city where I toiled many decades ago while a graduate student at Penn. Working with Camden’s Center for Environmental Transformation, the Penn group devised a coastal resilience plan for the city. They analyzed the data and built models to predict flooding based on each of three sources — flooding from rivers, from rain, and from sewers backing up.

Armed with this information, the collaboration led to the Camden Coastal Resilience Plan.
“We produced visualizations of the three types of flooding and how it happens in Camden and possible ways to prevent it.,” said Anushka Samant, a recent Penn planning graduate and project director. She further explained that “people understand risk at a very fine grain, at the level of where they live and move daily—the streets they use and the block they live on. So, seeing interventions overlaid on familiar neighborhood images helped translate how proposed solutions would function in their specific context.”

Now, if we could only devise ways to provide fine grained data concerning climate risks to our leaders.

Joe Nathanson is the retired principal of Urban Information Associates, a Baltimore-based economic and community development consulting firm. Since 2001, he has written a monthly column for The Daily Record and can be contacted at [email protected].