Coral Reef Restoration and Coastal Communities

By Supplemental Appropriations for Disaster Recovery Activities

As part of the U.S. Federal government’s recovery and restoration efforts following these natural disasters, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Coral Restoration Center and The Nature Conservancy (TNC), two organizations who conduct coral reef restoration efforts, approached the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to discuss the possibility of large-scale coral reef restoration in the areas impacted by the hurricanes (fig. 1). FEMA, which is required to conduct benefit:cost analyses (BCAs) to justify their funding of efforts to reduce coastal hazards, would needs such BCAs to release funding for coral restoration aimed at hazard risk reduction. To address this need, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) undertook an effort to assess and quantify, in social and economic terms, how the potential restoration of coral reefs off Florida and Puerto Rico could reduce the threats to, and increase the resiliency of, their coastal communities.

Figure 1. Map of benthic habitats and location of theoretical coral reef restoration off Key West, Florida, to reduce coastal hazards and increase the resiliency of coastal communities. (Public domain.)

Engineering, ecologic, social, and economic tools were combined to provide a quantitative valuation of the increase in coastal protection benefits provided by potential coral reef restoration off the State of Florida and the Territory of Puerto Rico, USA. The goal of this effort was to identify how, where, and when potential coral reef restoration could increase the coastal flood reduction benefits socially and economically (fig. 2).

hurricane damage to coral reef flooding — Figure 2. Example decrease in coastal flooding extent and the cost of flood damage to buildings caused by hurricane-induced damage to the coral reefs off Key West, Florida, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. (Credit: USGS. Public domain.)

This analysis follows a risk quantification valuation framework to estimate the risk reduction benefits from coral reefs and provide annual expected benefits in social and economic terms. This mapping represents a first unique and innovative effort to rigorous quantify the decrease in coastal hazard risk resulting from coral reef restoration, based on high resolution flooding modeling and state of art damage modeling and calculations based on approaches used by FEMA. The methods follow a sequence of steps (fig. 3) that integrate physics-based hydrodynamic modeling, quantitative geospatial modeling, and social and economic analyses to quantify the hazard, the role of coral reef restoration in decreasing coastal flooding, and the economic and social consequences.

coastal flooding hazard risk schematic — Schematic of methodology used to evaluate the increase in coastal flooding hazard risk due to hurricane-induced damage to coral reefs. Modified after Storlazzi and others (2019).

All of these data will be made available on our Coastal Change Hazards web portal for web viewing and download to provide actionable information to homeowners, coastal communities, and managers of public and private properties to improve resiliency for storm-induced coastal hazards.

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