Coastal Hazards and Resilience

Coastal hazards research seeks to advance the science of coastal and marine ecosystem services by combining research expertise in environmental and resource economics, ecology, geomorphology, geomatics, and engineering in an integrative framework. This research focuses on natural infrastructure, which is defined broadly as a physical stock that constitutes the restoration of natural ecosystem components. We aim to understand the nature and determinants of socially optimal investment in natural infrastructure in coasts and estuaries through a transdisciplinary lens. Concentrating on a selection of natural infrastructure types, including estuaries and dunes, we measure the expected economic benefits of an investment to society, expected direct costs, and expected co-benefits from the provision of ancillary ecosystem services. We are investigating four distinct systems on the Pacific Northwest coast that serve as applied pathways for our work. The project pathways focus on:

• Quantifying the value of both private and public coastal protection options, the determinants of private coastal protection decisions, and simulating different future coastal management alternatives.
• Coastal dune and beach management options optimized for ecosystem service provision.
• Restoring coastal wetlands and the resulting implications for anadromous fish (i.e., salmon), water quality, blue carbon, and land markets in estuarine systems.
• Allocating land use and construction of natural infrastructure to facilitate tsunami evacuation and provide other ecosystem services (i.e., recreation).