sessions 41-50
Wednesday, May 21 | 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Sessions
• #42 Emerging Perspectives on Hurricane Hazard: Damage Estimation for the Gulf Coast Region
• #43 State of the Coast Interdisciplinary-Science to Support Decision Making
• #44 Strategies and approaches for equitable climate resilience in the Gulf of Mexico
• #45 A Conversation on Culturally Focused Resilience Initiatives
Wednesday, May 21 | 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Room 286
#41 Creating a Pathway for Coastal Sustainability: The Vital Importance of Early Engagement in Coastal-Deltaic Challenges (A MissDelta Session)
A crucial problem in the coastal sciences is the lack of diversity, which is vital to effectively address the complex problems we face along our coasts. The MissDelta-led panel will bring together stakeholders from across the coastal workforce pipeline. The diverse group of panelists will discuss topics that center around working towards establishing pathways within the coastal workforce pipeline to promote diversity. The session aims to address: the critical role of early engagement in cultivating a diverse pipeline for coastal professions; emphasizing strategies to ensure inclusivity in coastal science careers in and out of academia; identify systemic barriers hindering participation of diverse individuals in coastal professions and discussing strategies to overcome challenges; and highlight successful programs and initiatives that promote access to education and training for diverse communities, ensuring a steady pipeline of skilled professionals ready to engage in coastal work. This interactive session will encourage participants to engage in meaningful dialogue, share insights, and collaborate on strategies to promote inclusion within the coastal workforce.
This work is supported in part by the Mississippi River Delta Transition Initiative (MissDelta) of the National Academies Gulf Research Program; this initiative seeks to explore the geomorphic and human future of the Birdsfoot Delta of the Mississippi and surrounding region, and to expand the diversity of the coastal scholar community.
Moderator: Barbara Kleiss – Tulane University
Presenters:
• Mitchell Andrus – Royal Engineers & Consultants
• Brooklyn Carter – Jackson State University
• Christie Landry – Fletcher Technical Community College and LASTEM-R3SC
• Michelle Sanchez – Tulane Center for K-12 STEM Education
• Faith Walton – Louisiana State University
• Brendan Yuill – US Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans District
Organizer: Dominique Garello – LSU
Wednesday, May 21 | 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Room 287
#42 Emerging Perspectives on Hurricane Hazard: Damage Estimation for the Gulf Coast Region
As coastal regions face increasing threats from hurricanes and flooding due to climate change, more comprehensive approaches to risk assessment and mitigation must be employed. Through the use of advanced modelling techniques, adaptive risk management, and detailed data analysis, this session covers emerging viewpoints for improved analysis and prediction of the complex risks associated with hurricanes and flooding.
The new perspectives on assessing and addressing future hurricane risk include several innovative approaches. The application of surrogate models for flood risk estimation in Coastal Louisiana enables efficient project evaluation and adaptive risk management while providing insight into project benefits and the impact of uncertainty on mitigation strategies. Comparisons between FEMA’s General Building Stock (GBS) and more precise structure inventories with specific locations and attributes from Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan emphasize the importance of detailed data for yielding accurate flood risk damage estimates. Another presentation covers the need to include wind damage alongside flood risk in hazard estimation for coastal regions, emphasizing how current models may underestimate total hazard by neglecting wind-related structural damage. Finally, a game-theoretic approach to pre-disaster relocation subsidies for single family homes in flood-prone Coastal Louisiana parishes is introduced with an accompanying equity analysis
Moderator: Mohammad Ahmadi Gharehtoragh – Purdue University
Presenters:
• David Johnson – Purdue University
• Mohammad Ahmadi Gharehtoragh – Purdue University
• Fangyuan Li – Purdue University
Organizer: Aaron Dewar – Purdue University
A Surrogate Modeling Approach to Scenario Generators for Estimating Future Flood Risk and Project Impacts
Mohammad Ahmadi Gharehtoragh – Purdue University
David Johnson – Purdue University
Planners managing complex systems often rely on similarly complex models to inform decision processes. For risk-based decision-making, they may need to simulate a large ensemble of hazardous events over long planning horizons matching the long useful lifetime of infrastructure. Under deep uncertainty about sea level rise, population change and other factors, this problem is further compounded by the need to model risk for many potential futures. Model complexity (i.e., computational costs) therefore constrains planners’ ability to effectively account for uncertainty. In this talk, we describe progress to date in developing machine learning-based surrogate models to emulate storm surge and wave hydrodynamics much more efficiently and on varied landscapes. By training surrogate models on ADCIRC+SWAN simulations from the 2023 Coastal Master Plan, we can predict inundation from synthetic tropical cyclones (TCs) as a function of not only the TC characteristics, but of landscape features (e.g., topography/bathymetry, vegetation), boundary conditions (e.g., sea level), and projects (e.g., implementation of marsh creation projects). We will detail the accuracy of surrogate models at predicting hydrodynamic outcomes and discuss how these models can enable new planning capabilities for the Master Plan. By enlisting the aid of surrogate models, policymakers and stakeholders can more easily comprehend and implement effective coastal protection strategies. This approach not only enhances predictive capabilities but also fosters a deeper understanding of how nature-based solutions can contribute to coastal resilience.
Adaptive Flood Risk Management for Coastal Louisiana
Fangyuan Li – Purdue University
Adaptive and flexible flood risk management strategies are increasingly necessary as climate change intensifies and extreme weather events become more frequent. However, selecting an appropriate portfolio of risk reduction measures given a limited budget is challenging due to a wide range of options and high future uncertainty. Decision-makers often rely on physics-based simulation models to evaluate the performance of projects, which are both time-consuming and expensive. Consequently, projects are typically evaluated individually and prioritized for only a few scenarios, making it difficult to develop an adaptive and flexible flood risk management portfolio.
In this study, we propose to: (1) develop a surrogate model for flood risk estimation in coastal Louisiana to facilitate easier project evaluation, (2) explore a more adaptive risk management portfolio, and (3) gain a deeper understanding of project benefits and the impacts of future uncertainties. The surrogate model utilizes synthetic datasets generated by hydrodynamic and risk assessment models as input and produces an approximation of the simulator. This approximation will be used to evaluate the performance of individual projects or combinations of projects under diverse future scenarios. This will allow us to identify signposts indicating that different actions are needed, such as a threshold for sea level rise that would signify whether structural or nonstructural risk reduction is more cost effective. By leveraging comprehensive data, we aim to identify pathways for an adaptive flood risk management portfolio and derive insights into how future uncertainties influence the selection of mitigation measures.
Evaluating Pre-Disaster Subsidy Relocations in Coastal Louisiana via Agent-Based Modeling
David Johnson – Purdue University
Pragathi Jha – Purdue University
Building upon Bier et al. (2020), we talk about a novel game-theoretic pre-disaster relocation scheme where the government provides subsidies to motivate homeowners to relocate earlier. We assume that the homeowners decide the relocation year by comparing future flood risks with relocation costs, and the government decides which year to offer subsidies to minimize its overall losses. Our analysis of the model and results from this framework highlight some interesting takeaways for policy makers. We work with the structure inventory information for single family homes of Coastal Louisiana and leverage the idea of difference in monetary discounting between government actor and homeowners. Exploring sensitivity of parameters we find dependency on actors’ discount rates. We also explore equity considerations coastwide and find (more or less) uniform distribution of benefits across various groups. Future scope of this work is to account for differences in risk perception between different actors to allow for better policy analysis and design.
Wednesday, May 21 | 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Room 291
#43 State of the Coast Interdisciplinary-Science to Support Decision Making
Decisions being made in Louisiana to support communities and manage ecosystems are diverse, ranging from deciding how to restore the coast, to managing inland systems such as aquifers, to working with partners to manage the Mississippi River, and beyond. Across these varied needs and applications there is a common truth: making impactful and robust decisions is highly and increasingly complex. Challenges include uncertainty about the future (storms, sea level rise, human population dynamics, etc.), lack of data, insufficient understanding to project outcomes, and/or missing information to parameterize existing models for evaluating outcomes from potential choices. Just as there are common challenges regardless of the specific management issues, there are common methods, tools, and approaches that can be leveraged as solutions. Best practices include building interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teams that can holistically evaluate the positive and negative outcomes of potential decisions, along with application of decision analysis approaches to reduce bias, increase transparency, and identify pathways that achieve objectives while being as robust as possible to unknowns and uncertainties. In this session, we examine decision-analysis approaches across a range of applications, including Climate Action Planning; policy-making; and natural resource management. We demonstrate and discuss commonalities in best practice across application, as well as considerations in determining the appropriate approaches to advance management-specific objectives.
Moderator: Ashlee Minor – The Water Institute
Presenters:
• Jessica Henkel – The Water Institute
• Alyssa Dausman – The Water Institute
• Christopher Esposito – The Water Institute
• Soupy Dalyander – The Water Institute
Lessons Learned in the application of decision-analysis to Policy and Planning in the Gulf Coast
Jessica Henkel – The Water Institute
City, state and federal decision-makers working to restore and improve resilience across the Gulf Coast face a variety of challenges including information gaps, contentious governance, and often siloed management of critical systems and environments. Methodologies intended to bring structure and transparency to complex multi-objective and multi-party decisions, including Structured Decision Making (SDM), Robust Decision Making (RDM), and related DMDU methods, can provide a framework for overcoming difficult governance challenges, expanding the alternatives to consider, and integrating multiple uncertainties and systems.
Over the past five years, multidisciplinary teams composed of decision analysts, urban planners, and physical scientists have applied a variety of decision support methods into planning at multiple scales, with successes and lessons learned. These projects include a municipal resilience plan for a city larger than 2200 sq. km that incorporated a detailed analysis of spatial alternatives to inform place-appropriate adaptation strategies; a long-term strategic water sustainability plan for groundwater resources in Baton Rouge; a strategic plan for a climate resilience lab in St. Mary Parish; and more.
This presentation will discuss how decision science methods were originally scoped into these planning projects, how their application worked and evolved in the project context, and how those methods impacted the project’s goals and implementation. We will highlight lessons learned about the conditions for successful application of SDM methods, and discuss how decision scientists can develop relevant methods for practical application in complex policy and planning processes.
Louisiana Climate Action Plan: Initial Development using Structured Decision-Making
Alyssa Dausman – The Water Institute| View Presentation
Climate action planning continues to accelerate as communities seek to thrive in an uncertain future. Climate action planning is a contentious and complex topic in the southern United States, however, because of economic reliance on industries that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and a complicated relationship between industry and persistent racial and economic inequities that contribute to distrust between communities, businesses, and state governments. Research has begun to evaluate approaches used to develop climate action plans, finding that planning efforts are often as diverse as the localities they represent. Climate action planning processes that evaluate the potential implications of climate action on greenhouse gas emissions and societal values are often driven by either qualitative stakeholder engagement or by the results of numerical models. While both approaches are valuable, they also have limitations that can result in plans that are unrealistic or unimplementable. Limited research is available on planning efforts that integrate multiple evaluation methodologies. To develop the 2022 Louisiana Climate Action Plan, we integrated qualitative and quantitative climate action evaluation methodologies in a planning process grounded in structured decision-making to evaluate potential implications of climate action for Louisiana. We found that integration of approaches through a transparent, structured, and objectives-orientated process allowed for robust analysis of potential climate actions while engendering process buy-in across diverse stakeholder interests. This process ultimately resulted in the unanimous adoption of Louisiana’s climate action plan, characterized by a wholistic and implementable set of climate actions balanced against the values of Louisianians. The process outlined in this study represents a replicable approach for other climate action planning efforts.
Improving Strategic Decision Making in the Lowermost Mississippi River through Robust Decision Making
Christopher Esposito – The Water Institute
Managing the Lowermost Mississippi River as a navigation conduit, potential flood hazard, and environmental resource is a complex task requiring coordinated decision-making among multiple entities with varying, sometimes conflicting, interests. This challenge will grow in the coming decades as strategic decisions (e.g., managing the deteriorating east bank) intersect with accelerated changes in sea level and precipitation patterns that shape the system’s boundaries.
To address this, the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana (CPRA) seeks strategies that align with its interests and encourage cooperation with other stakeholders. The Water Institute has developed a tool to automate the execution of a HEC-RAS model that simulates water and sediment flow throughout the Lowermost Mississippi River and its distributaries and outlets. This tool enables thousands of HEC-RAS model runs, allowing researchers to evaluate proposed strategies for vulnerabilities within a formal Robust Decision Making (RDM) framework across a range of environmental forces and decisions, and improve them iteratively. Additionally, the tool reveals trade-offs between management strategies for different objectives and how they may shift under future scenarios.
The RDM framework was applied to three strategies: Business as Usual, where decision-making continues as it does today; an Alternate Navigation Channel strategy, where the main river channel is abandoned for deep draft navigation south of Empire in favor of a new channel; and an Adjusted Flow Split strategy, which changes the 70/30 flow division between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers.
Back to the Sandbox: Reduced complexity modeling in support of Louisiana’s Barrier Island System Management program
Soupy Dalyander – The Water Institute
Storms, rising seas, and other factors drive erosion along Louisiana’s barrier islands and headlands, threatening provision of valuable ecosystem services such as storm protection. The Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority initiated the Barrier Island System Management (BISM) program to replace site-by-site management of these features, enabling more efficient use of available sediment to meet increasing demands for restoration. Here, we present a coastal simulation framework that can project outcomes for the barrier island with and without different potential restoration scenarios. The framework consists of a collection of reduced complexity models of: i) barrier islands, ii) shoals and inlets, iii) coastal headlands and iv) sediment storage in borrow pits, bays, and offshore areas. During each step forward in time, edges of a directed graph are used to inform sediment exchange between connected reduced complexity models. These connections represent natural sediment pathways (e.g., longshore transport) and restoration efforts (e.g., beach nourishment from a dredged borrow pit). While some model parameters are potentially knowable, many of them comprise “deep uncertainties” that represent complex unsimulatable processes or require information that decision makers do not have access to (e.g., future sea-level rise and littoral sediment transport). The model is lightweight and can support thousands of simulations of potential futures, enabling it to be used in conjunction with a Robust Decision Making (RDM) toolkit (featured in another presentation in the session) to identify effective restoration strategies that robust across these uncertainties.
Wednesday, May 21 | 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Room 292
#44 Strategies and approaches for equitable climate resilience in the Gulf of Mexico
Coastal and inland communities along the U.S. Gulf Coast are experiencing climate change firsthand. The negative effects are wide-ranging, felt across our natural and built environments, cultures, and economies and they disproportionally impact under resourced and underserved communities. Equitable climate resilience requires explicitly considering socioeconomic inequities and the resulting differences in power, knowledge, and resources that impede mitigation and adaptation. This session will explore frameworks and strategies for equitable climate resilience actions for communities in the Gulf Coast and beyond. Session presenters will share updates and invite discussion around current and future efforts to increase understanding and take action to address climate vulnerability through policy, direct practice, and research.
Moderator: Renee Collini – The Water Institute
Presenters:
• Katya Wowk – The Water Institute
• Allison Dejong – The Water Institute
• Colleen McHugh – The Water Institute
• Melissa Awbrey
Fundamentals for Equitable Climate Resilience
Katya Wowk – The Water Institute | View Presentation
Ensuring communities have the fundamental knowledge, capacity, and technical support needed to address climate challenges underpins much of the Community Resilience Center’s work. By working with communities to secure the key building blocks of climate resilience, we are helping to address specific barriers of today while also building toward larger transformational change. Work within this focus area aims to foster effective community-led resilience planning and action by addressing gaps in necessary capacity and knowledge top-down and bottom-up. Center projects focused on fundamentals for equitable climate resilience strengthen networks and build capacity for resilience actions, provide resilience support, and foster inclusive and culturally-responsive decision-making. The development of finer resolution and more diverse data as well as enhanced evaluation metrics further supports local resilience building and equitable decision making. Example projects on assessing and tracking resilience and outcomes from trainings to increase top-down capacity for more inclusive engagement will be reviewed.
Community-Led Migration Legal Frameworks and Approaches and Equitable Flood Risk Planning and Policies
Allison Dejong – The Water Institute & Colleen McHugh – The Water Institute
Projects focused on equitable flood-risk and community-led migration address key practice and implementation concerns identified by Gulf stakeholders and practitioners. The nature, extent, and degree of flood risk is evolving across the Gulf Coast, and communities face challenges equitably applying the best available science and data on flood risk to decisions about land use, development, and infrastructure. The Community Resilience Center (Center) is working to explore policy and process mechanisms to integrate more advanced data into decisions and planning, while also proactively considering the distribution of the additional burden new requirements may bring. This presentation will review the national landscape of when more advanced flood risk data are used in regulatory settings and preliminary findings on how these types of policies might consider disproportionate burdens. Further, communities across the Gulf have identified a need for alternative migration strategies, policies, and processes. Partners want approaches that are less burdensome, are responsive to ways in which people already are migrating in the region, enable communities to determine their own migration strategies, and result in more equitable outcomes. The Center is working to understand and improve existing climate migration policies, bureaucracy, and practices while working towards larger transformational changes. This includes supporting community-led migration through identification of gaps in inclusive decision-making processes that guide climate migration coordination, planning, and implementation. This presentation will review the findings of legal and bureaucratic review and discuss the priority areas identified for further analysis and potential collaborations to reduce barriers to equitable, community-led migration on the coast.
Love and Care in Climate Adaptation: A Framework
Melissa Awbrey
As a global community of human and non-human inhabitants of this planet, we face much uncertainty regarding climate change. Ultimately, we do not know whether we will meaningfully mitigate greenhouse gas emissions quickly enough or whether our efforts to adapt will lead to a more or a less just, equitable, and sustainable society.
Current efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change mostly focus on what needs to be done – electrifying the grid, protecting coastal areas, reducing urban heat island effects, planning for relocation, etc. Though these efforts at times address or try to address the human and social aspects of climate strategies, they rarely if ever intentionally and explicitly center love and care as an integral part of the process.
I argue that for climate adaptation strategies to avoid maladaptation and to work instead toward a more just, equitable, and sustainable future, love and care must play a vital and credible role in how we respond to climate change. In my presentation, I will share a framework to support the integration of love and care into climate adaptation efforts and decision making. The framework includes methods to assess whether love and care are present in adaptation efforts and suggestions for how to better integrate them.
Given the serious risks for maladaptation and the increasing need to adapt to the impacts of climate change in just, equitable, sustainable, and ultimately life-affirming ways, this framework is not only timely, but also opens a critical space for further exploration.
Wednesday, May 21 | 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Room 290
#45 A Conversation on Culturally Focused Resilience Initiatives
The Louisiana cultural sector consists of organizations, communities, professionals, and individuals who create culture; facilitate cultural preservation, engagement and access; and safeguard our state’s cultural resources and practices. As our region confronts the challenges of living in a changing environment, an increasing number of initiatives are exploring what the threat of climate change and the work of resilience means for our cultural infrastructure. This conversation brings together representatives from three such initiatives working at the national, state, and regional level. Representatives will be led in a discussion centered around the effects of climate change on the cultural organizations and communities with whom they work, exploring the efforts they are undertaking, and confronting the concerns and challenges of working resilience into the cultural conversation. Organizations and initiatives include:
LSU-led “Providing Risk of the Environment’s Changing Climate Threats for Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums” or PROTECCT-GLAM, an IMLS-funded research project developing an open access climate risk scale designed for use by galleries, libraries, archives, and museums across the nation;
Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH), Louisiana’s humanities council, focusing on the changing role councils are undertaking in the face of increasing emergency events; and
United Houma Nation, leading a multi-organization partnership funded by the U. S. Department of Commerce and NOAA to implement a comprehensive plan to advance resilience.
Moderator: Chris Robert – Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities
Panelists:
• Edward Benoit, III – Louisiana State University and A&M College
• Lora Ann Chaisson – United Houma Nation
• Erin Voisin – Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities
Organizer: Erin Voisin – Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities
Wednesday, May 21 | 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Room 289
#46 The Community Lighthouse Model: The Five Fronts of Climate Resilience
View Presentation
After decades of climate disasters, extreme heat and a crumbling electrical infrastructure, a grassroots movement from Louisiana’s most climate-vulnerable neighborhoods has built a model for climate resilience that’s gaining national recognition. In just a few years, the Community Lighthouse strategy (CLH) has raised $12M, has been praised by local, state & national officials, including a visit from the U.S. Secretary of Energy, and has built the largest network of microgrid resilience hubs in the world.
CLH is about more than panels and batteries. This panel will present on the five components that make CLH an important model:
• Neighborhood hubs: Existing local institutions anchor strategy, with a goal that no one live more than 15 minutes from a resilience hub
• Resilient energy: Grid-tied solar+ storage microgrids can island from the grid when power fails, allowing Lighthouses to operate indefinitely off-grid.
• Social Capital: Canvassing, training and trauma support strengthen connections, local leadership and power to affect decision-making
• Local jobs: Working closely with labor unions, the strategy is hiring and training local workers so our community benefits from the energy transition.
• Grid reform: Integrating the growing network of batteries from resilience hubs into a virtual power plant to make the grid less centralized, less vulnerable, less carbon intensive and more affordable.
This panel will bring together experts to discuss each component’s contribution to community resilience and their integration into the CLH strategy.
Moderator: Broderick Bagert – Together Louisiana
Presenters:
• Joshua Cox – Community Power South
• Jennifer (Jen) Scott – Louisiana State University, School of Social Work
• Pierre Moses – 127 Energy
• Jason Dedon – International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 995
• Arushi Sharma Frank – Luminary Strategies, LLC
Organizer: Broderick Bagert – Together Louisiana
Wednesday, May 21 | 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Room 288
#47 SELA Voice: A Coalition to Inform Community-Based Advocacy in Southeast Louisiana
Louisiana’s coast-dependent residents understand that their lives are intimately tied to the well-being of their neighbors, communities, and ecosystems. When river flooding leads to coastal algae blooms, new refineries are built, chemical releases occur, or hurricanes hit, they feel it first and most persistently. This is because—as the region’s Indigenous, Black, immigrant, migrant, rural, and low-income residents will tell you—as goes the coast, so go its people.
Bringing together members of community-based and environmental organizations that comprise Southeast Louisiana Voices of Impacted Communities & Environments (SELA VOICE), this lightning session considers how communities understand, prepare for, and respond to the changing coast. Persistent crises force residents to develop unique survival skills. Our purpose is to consider how a future with action can center the needs and expertise of Southeast Louisiana’s frontline, fenceline, and shoreline residents. We believe that placing people and ecosystems at the center of conversations about coastal futures can change how everyone thinks about restoration. SELA VOICE members will highlight the knowledge, unique to the communities and ecosystems with whom they work; offering valuable insights into the possibilities of community-driven stewardship, and its capacity to shape the future of Louisiana’s restoration initiatives.
Moderator: Dan Favre – Greater New Orleans Foundation
Presenters:
• Sandy Nguyen – Coastal Community Consulting, Inc.
• Corey Miller – Pontchartrain Conservancy
• Natalie Manning – Lower 9th Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development
• Will Thinnes – CRCL
• Matt Rota – Healthy Gulf
• Simi Kang – University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• Jonathan Foret – South Louisiana Wetlands Discovery Center
• Khai Nguyen – Song Community Development Corporation
Organizer: Simi Kang – University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Crisis and Economic Development in Commercial Fishing
Sandy Nguyen – Coastal Community Consulting, Inc.
Coastal Communities Consulting (CCC) is a 501(C)(3) non-profit organization founded in the wake of 2010’s BP oil spill to support Southeast Louisiana’s rural small business workers, their families, and the communities who depend on them. This presentation focuses on the economic and environmental impacts of crisis, disaster, and economic shifts on coast-dependent family businesses. It does so by centering immigrant, refugee, rural, and low-income fishing and coast-dependent knowledge. As residents and workers on the coast, Louisiana’s small fishing families have a great deal of insight into what effective and collaborative adaptation and stewardship could look like.
Science for Our Coast and Communities
Corey Miller – Pontchartrain Conservancy | View Presentation
This presentation highlights the Pontchartrain Conservancy’s efforts to meet the needs of communities across the 16-parish Pontchartrain Basin to address challenges related to our coastal environment. The presentation will focus on our work with teachers, students, and residents to provide STEM education, improve water quality, increase storm preparedness, abate marine debris, and strengthen coastal resilience.
Fostering Community Inclusion for Healthy Gulf Futures
Matt Rota – Healthy Gulf | View Presentation
Healthy Gulf’s purpose is to collaborate with and serve communities who love the Gulf of Mexico by providing the research, communications, and coalition-building tools needed to reverse the long pattern of over-exploitation of the Gulf’s natural resources. While Louisiana has made great strides in coastal restoration through the Coastal Master Plan, communities feel largely left out of the process. Drawing on Healthy Gulf’s 30 years of working with coastal communities, we will discuss how to best include communities in vital coastal decisions and bring their needs and expertise into the coastal restoration and protection dialogue.
Wednesday, May 21 | 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Room 285
#48 New Horizons in the Co-Production of Knowledge: Creating Meaningful Change for Coastal Communities – A MissDelta Session
The meaningful involvement of individuals with a direct stake in research outcomes—who are not researchers themselves—can enhance the quality of scientific studies and foster positive, socially just change in society. This principle underpins the co-production of knowledge, an umbrella term for research that integrates diverse perspectives to create new knowledge, tools, products, processes, and outcomes. Co-produced research occurs when all stakeholders, including residents with lived experience and researchers with scientific expertise, collaborate to conceptualize, design, and deliver research, thereby enhancing understanding and knowledge. It is rooted in the idea that no one group is more important than another and often includes a wide range of participants, such as service users, community members, policymakers, business owners, and non-profits. Despite the benefits of co-produced research, there is little consensus among practitioners regarding best practices to achieve meaningful change at the community level or to influence policy. This panel provides a platform for both academics and non-academics to share their observations and experiences with co-produced research and its effectiveness in driving change in coastal communities. This work is supported in part by the Mississippi River Delta Transition Initiative (MissDelta) of the National Academies Gulf Research Program; this initiative seeks to explore the geomorphic and human future of the Birdsfoot Delta of the Mississippi and surrounding region, and to expand the diversity of the coastal scholar community.
Moderator: Scott Hemmerling – The Water Institute
Panelists:
• Traci Birch – Louisiana State University
• Matt Bethel – Louisiana Sea Grant College Program
• Qiyamah Williams – PLACE-SLR
• Honora Buras – Bayou Culture Collaborative
• Kellyn LaCour-Conant – Taproot Earth
Organizer: Scott Hemmerling – The Water Institute
Wednesday, May 21 | 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Room 284
#49 Developing the New Atchafalaya Master Plan – Decision Framework, Modeling Efforts, and Freshwater Fisheries Challenges
An overview of the new Atchafalaya Master Plan, where we will discuss the creation of a comprehensive decision framework, the modeling techniques being employed, and the pressing issues facing freshwater fisheries within the Atchafalaya River System. This session will provide insights into the strategies and methodologies guiding the plan’s development and address the critical concerns impacting the region’s ecological health.
Moderator: Sadie Morgan – Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority
Panelists:
• Paige Green – Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority
• Denise Reed – Denise Reed, LLC
• Zachary Romaine – Royal
• Brac Salyers – Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries
Organizer: Kristen Chatelain
Wednesday, May 21 | 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Room 283
#50 Diverse Challenges Associated with Restoration Project Planning, Design, and Implementation
In the continued push for coastal restoration activities, the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) and its partnering agencies and consultants have found the constant need to adapt the criteria, strategies, and methods used to address the diverse challenges encountered throughout the life of a project. As more restoration projects are proposed and implemented, unique challenges continue to be encountered in the delivery of these projects. This session will explore some of the current challenges encountered during the planning, design, and implementation of restoration projects across the coast of Louisiana. Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan models are typically used to understand the current and potential future coastal landscape and risks to wetlands and communities. The first three presentations in this session focus on recent efforts to use these models in a novel way—to take a retrospective look at the last 15 to 20 years through hindcasting. They answer questions like: How well do our vegetation model predictions of species distribution align with CRMS observations over the last decade and a half? How have protection projects reduced storm surge-based flood risk since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita? The final presentation focuses on exploration of an innovative method for making surge and wave modeling across varying landscapes more efficient for Coastal Master Plan project evaluation and risk analysis through the use of machine learning-based surrogate models.
This session will highlight the planning level adjustments that have been made to the evaluation of proposed restoration projects across the state, as well as how future projects are anticipated to be evaluated. Additionally, two of the presentations will discuss design and construction challenges that have been encountered on several recent restoration projects, with lessons learned that can be applied to future projects. These topics include the acceptance of a marsh creation area (volume-based versus elevation-based acceptance criteria) and project-specific equipment access challenges. Lastly, the final presentation will provide a comprehensive overview of the both the strategies employed and the unique challenges faced during the planning, design, and construction of one of CPRA’s most recent projects, the Houma Navigation Canal Bird Island Restoration (TE-0165) project.
Moderator: Adam Linson – CPRA
Presenters:
• Terri Von Hoven – Army Corps of Engineers
• Joanne Tribou – CPRA
• Dylan Ohlsen – CPRA
• Jarret Bauer – All South Consulting Engineers, LLC
Restoration Project Planning, Assessment, and Evaluation
Terri Von Hoven – Army Corps of Engineers | View Presentation
For over 30 years, the CWPPRA program has provided a predictable and recurring funding stream for the design and construction of coastal wetlands restoration projects across Louisiana. Through its annual project selection cycle termed the “Priority Project List” or “PPL”, projects are nominated, assessed, and analyzed – culminating in the selection of various coastal restoration projects slated to receive funding for engineering and design. The “Phase 0” process includes the nomination of projects from all across the Louisiana coast. The proposed projects are evaluated on various criteria, such as the proposed features, perceived benefits, and estimates of preliminary fully funded costs. These criteria are largely impacted by existing site conditions, such as hydrologic conditions (e.g. water depths), geomorphology, geotechnical, and existing infrastructure.
Over the last several years, the CWPPRA program has found the need to adjust the evaluation of these criteria, as well introduce new criteria, to evaluate potential projects in their push for continued coastal restoration activities. Sharp rises in construction cost have become a major hurdle for otherwise beneficial restoration projects, often reducing or even eliminating projects early in the planning process. Additional complications from land rights and critical habitat, as well as site-specific challenges, have altered how the program has evaluated projects and signifies a shift in priority for future priority lists. This presentation will outline this shift in evaluation criteria as well the outline of the program’s anticipated evaluation of future projects.
Acceptance of Marsh Fill Based on Volume versus Elevation
Joanne Tribou – CPRA | View Presentation
The Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority has constructed thousands of acres of new marsh throughout the entire coastal zone of Louisiana over the last twenty years. This has been accomplished by hydraulically dredging soil from borrow areas in existing water bodies and conveying the dredge slurry to adjacent marsh creation areas. The dredge slurry is able to be conveyed over many miles due to the fact that it is mainly composed of water. Earthen containment dikes are constructed around the perimeter of the marsh creation areas in order to contain the dredge slurry and allow the separation of solids from the water over time. To date, construction contracting has mandated that measurement for acceptance of the marsh fill be based solely on the elevation of the marsh fill after dredging is finished. Due to the variability of the water content in the dredge slurry, the elevation of the marsh platform can also be highly variable. In order to alleviate the potential problems this variability may cause during construction, we shall investigate alternative solutions founded upon quality assurance and quality control.
Assessment of Equipment Access and Logistics for Marine Construction
Dylan Ohlsen – CPRA | View Presentation
Equipment access is a vital logistical component of coastal restoration projects, and has become a more prevalent design consideration in recent years. Due to the often remote locations of these projects, design teams must identify navigable routes through nearby waterways, while reducing impacts to various resources and stakeholders across the coast of Louisiana. Desktop studies and various data collection efforts are performed in order to evaluate potential impacts to water bottoms, existing infrastructure, cultural resources, and critical habitat. Additionally, coordination with landowners may present additional access restrictions. Often times, multiple data collection efforts are required to fully evaluate equipment access alternatives. Evaluation of these factors is also dependent on the project-specific features and anticipated equipment and draft depths, and can be specific to individual contractors. Equipment types and required draft are often times not known until the start of construction. Dredging for equipment access can have large cost implications for projects, thereby reducing potential benefits and creating potential specific requirements through the permitting process. This presentation will address project-specific equipment access challenges on recent CPRA projects, which has altered the way in which current and future projects have (and will be) evaluated.
Lessons Learned from Houma Navigation Canal (HNC) Bird Island Restoration (TE-0165) Project
Jarret Bauer – All South Consulting Engineers, LLC
The Houma Navigation Canal (HNC) Bird Island Restoration (TE-0165) project consists of the restoration of an approximately 27-acre island located four (4) miles south of Cocodrie in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. The island has historically supported an important colonial nesting bird colony, including species such as Brown Pelicans, Roseate Spoonbills, Royal Terns, Tricolored Herons, and Laughing Gulls. The targeted project features sought to improve and expand upon the existing island, working to restore this critical bird habitat. The project included sand fill placement to varying elevations to support nesting habitat for these various species, marsh restoration and nourishment, perimeter rock dikes and breakwater construction to protect the island, and the identification and creation of tidal exchange points. This presentation will provide a comprehensive overview of the both the strategies employed, as well as the challenges faced, during the planning, design, and construction of the TE-0165 project. Examples of some these challenges include a shallow working environment near the island, work adjacent to a Federally authorized channel, identifying suitable fill materials, and construction which accommodates natural bird nesting patterns.