In a recent study published in Nature, coastal researchers evaluate salt marsh restoration as a flood prevention measure to protect community water resilience. The study, titled “The value of marsh restoration for flood risk in an urban estuary,” utilizes a hydrodynamic model of San Francisco Bay to simulate storms and their flood impacts with and without salt marsh restoration in the surrounding area.
The author team includes Rae Taylor-Burns, Christopher Lowrie, Borja Reguero and Michael Beck from University of California Santa Cruz, as well as experts from USGS’s Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center and the San Francisco Estuary Institute. Burns, the lead author, is a postdoctoral fellow with UCSC’s Center for Coastal Climate Resilience.
Key findings from the study include the identification of priority areas for marsh restoration in the San Francisco Bay Area, a detailed flood model for risk evaluation to aid in restoration planning, and ideas for cost-effective investments in marsh restoration to increase economic and social benefits.
Abstract: The use of nature-based solutions (NBS) for coastal climate adaptation has broad and growing interest, but NBS are rarely assessed with the same rigor as traditional engineering solutions or with respect to future climate change scenarios. These gaps pose challenges for the use of NBS for climate adaptation. Here, we value the flood protection benefits of stakeholder-identified marsh restoration under current and future climate change within San Francisco Bay, a densely urbanized estuary, and specifically on the shores of San Mateo County, the county most vulnerable to future flooding in California. Marsh restoration provides a present value of $21 million which increases to over $100 million with 0.5 m of sea level rise (SLR), and to about $500 million with 1 m of SLR. There are hotspots within the county where marsh restoration delivers very high benefits for adaptation, which reach $9 million/hectare with likely future sea level and storm conditions. Today’s investments in nature and community resilience can result in increasing payoffs as climate change progresses and risk increases.
Check out the full paper here. You can also read more about the paper from UCSC’s Center for Coastal Climate Resilience here.
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