Design for Climate Adaptation

Hazards like coastal storm surges, stormwater flooding, intensifying precipitations, extreme heat, wildfires, and biodiversity loss are threatening communities across the globe. Investing in robust climate adaptive landscapes can help tackle these challenges. For decades, SCAPE has worked across disciplines, interpreting and leveraging the best available science and translating complex risks into strategies that protect communities and the landscapes that carry them.

Climate risk crosses jurisdictional boundaries, and resilience planning must do the same. SCAPE works at the scale of states and regions to help agencies, jurisdictions, and communities strategize, plan, and design together, coordinating multiple voices into a single vision.

At a statewide scale, we’ve worked for over eight years with the State of Louisiana on their Coastal Master Plan, which gets revised every six years. This work validates the idea that adaptation is an ongoing cycle requiring investment in engagement, data collection, modeling, and an understanding that the plans we produce should be viewed as evolving frameworks. Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan embraces this, equipping the state and community members with the tools to face and adapt to land loss and other climate risks.

Nature-based solutions are central to this work and can be deployed at a large scale across regions. Reefs, coastal wetlands, and urban forests reduce risk, restore ecosystem services, support biodiversity, and create places people want to be in. SCAPE's plan for Resilient New Jersey implements those strategies at a regional scale.

Cities are prime testing grounds for adaptation. SCAPE partners with municipalities, committee boards, and community leaders to understand the unique geographic needs and implementation structures required of a city to develop strategies that are holistic, actionable, and built to last. Sometimes, these conditions vary drastically, like in Jacksonville, the largest city in the U.S. by land area.

Downtown Jacksonville looks nothing like the city’s suburbs or rural landscapes. For Resilient Jacksonville, SCAPE outlined eight development types as an organizing mechanism for over 45 place-specific adaptation strategies.

Adaptation also demands long-term thinking, balancing future benefits with immediate needs. SCAPE works with cities to make long-term plans, like the Resilient Boston Harbor Vision, which stitched neighborhood planning efforts into a connected network of parks along 47 miles of shoreline.

Some of our most ambitious city-scale work takes a longer geological view, harnessing natural processes to imagine how a coastline or watershed might adapt over decades. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the Public Sediment project proposed designing with mud itself: harvesting sediment, unlocking tributary channels, and connecting vulnerable neighborhoods to the Bay through civic sensing stations and youth-led environmental monitoring.

In Hayward, California, a joint power authority created a unique framework for collaboration between municipal and regional agencies, opening the door to deeper engagement across a broader coalition of stakeholders. The resulting Hayward Regional Shoreline Adaptation Master Plan emerged from two years of analysis, community engagement, and planning, ultimately charting a proactive course for adapting communities, infrastructure, and ecosystems along the Bay shoreline to sea-level rise and other climate impacts. Unanimously adopted by the City of Hayward in February 2021, the plan ensures that the impacts of climate change, which are most visceral at the neighborhood level, are addressed by centering community voices.

Universities, cultural institutions, and other large landowners face their own adaptation challenges—managing historic landscapes, maintaining long-term operations, and stewarding resources across generations in the face of flooding, wildfires, and extreme heat. SCAPE works alongside institutions to help them think about resilience, future threats, and preserving urban forests.

Climate change is happening quickly and evolving constantly. To keep up, it’s imperative to test new methods, gather real-world data, and ask bigger questions about what adaptation can look like at scale. While some regions experience rain bombs and flash floods, others face extreme heat. Landscape architects and urban designers bring an exceptional toolkit to bear, integrating cooling infrastructure into streetscapes and helping cities maintain and expand urban forests.

From individual sites to entire regions, SCAPE is committed to shaping systems of resilience that help cities, communities, and ecosystems thrive in the face of climate-changed future.