Strengthening Maryland's Coasts

Crisfield, Maryland
Building a Model For Resilient Communities

The Nature Conservancy and a variety of partners are working with the Town of Crisfield and members of its community to address challenges due to its low elevation and proximity to the Chesapeake Bay. In recent years, the town has become increasingly vulnerable to flooding, which is impacting the community and hampering economic growth. Tides have become more extreme, leading to more frequent nuisance flooding on roads that impede access to important parts of the community. Even smaller storms are having a more severe impact, often forcing schools and businesses to close and leaving property owners with expensive damage and losses. As in many small coastal communities, the severity of these impacts has been disproportionate to the resources available to address them.

For TNC and our partners, Crisfield represents a place that can serve as a model for improving community resilience to flooding. Starting in 2022, this led to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) funded project to assess the benefits of potential new flood adaptation strategies to support the city’s planning efforts. 

The partners are also working with the town to build local capacity for supporting resilience-improvement projects that include an early flood warning system and an effort to map all of Crisfield’s drainage infrastructure. They are also exploring how nature-based solutions such as green infrastructure and marsh restoration can support the community’s long-term resilience. 

SEAFARE: Improving access to climate adaptation funding for Maryland Communities

Maryland is experiencing one of the highest rates of sea-level rise in the country, but the most heavily impacted coastal communities in Maryland have not received climate adaptation and flood mitigation funding at the scale required to effectively improve resilience along its more than 7,700 miles of shoreline. Sea-level rise and other impacts of climate change disproportionately impact coastal communities—especially communities that have been historically underserved and overburdened—which are frequently also communities of color. These communities have the greatest hurdles to overcome to access climate adaptation funding, which includes complicated legislative frameworks, complex and alienating solicitation language and restrictive funding criteria. This results in climate adaptation programs that perpetuate and even exacerbate inequities.

The Supporting Equitable Access to Funding for Adaptation Resources—or SEAFARE—is the result of a series of workshops conducted by the Maryland/DC Chapter with climate adaptation practitioners, environmental justice leaders, non-profit partners, residents of coastal Maryland and state and federal officials to identify those barriers and create a toolkit with recommendations for decision-makers on ways to improve these funding systems. Check out our storymap and report to learn more.

Toward a Resilient Coastline in Maryland: COEF addresses barriers to coastal resilience funding

Building upon the Supporting Equitable Access to Funding for Adaptation Resources (SEAFARE) report and storymap, the Maryland/DC Chapter just released Toward a Resilient Coastline in Maryland, a new report that seeks to highlight the barriers that many coastal communities face in addressing impacts of climate change. This new report offers a roadmap for building resilient coastal communities in Maryland and marks the culmination of extensive collaboration.

The effort, led by Community Outreach and Engagement Forums (COEF), brought together leaders from Maryland’s coastal communities, local governments, community-based organizations, and academic institutions to discuss the new and worsening challenges posed by climate change. COEF partners identified flooding and infrastructure needs as their most pressing concern. The lack of readily accessible funding streams, capacity gaps in local governments, and hard to understand state and federal processes have created a large gap between Maryland’s stated climate goals and communities facing the first impacts of climate change being able to see themselves reflected in this vision for a resilient state.

To address the key issues and cross cutting themes identified, COEF partners proposed 15 policy development areas, leveraging U.S. Army Corps of Engineers funding, applying for resilience funding under the Whole Watershed Act in Maryland, local governments working together to utilize private sources of funding, and partnering with state agencies for infrastructure repair projects. TNC’s Maryland/DC Chapter will continue organizing COEF meetings to keep building on the policy recommendations and moving our state towards implementation of climate adaptation solutions.

REPI Challenge

In late 2020, The Atlantic Test Ranges and Naval Air Station Patuxent River were awarded a $3 million grant from the Department of Defense’s Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration (REPI) Program to protect land on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The funds will be used to purchase easements on 4,000 acres of land, establishing a resilient and connected marsh migration corridor and preventing incompatible development within the Navy’s fly zone. The U.S. Navy will partner with TNC, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and others on the protection effort.

Since the award was announced, TNC has completed a land prioritization mapping exercise to identify the parcels that will provide the highest return on investment for people and nature. With TNC staff working on the ground with landowners, the Maryland REPI partnership is ready to begin the ambitious work of protecting 4,000 acres of critical coastal habitat.