Even after two and a half years, many of New Jersey’s coastal communities are still struggling to manage immediate post-Hurricane Sandy recovery and rebuilding efforts. These towns face political pressure to rebuild as soon as possible, despite the growing realization that merely returning a community to its pre-storm state, coupled with sea level rise, will inevitably put more people and property in harm’s way.

One of the first and most critical steps these communities must take to plan resilient adaptation strategies effectively is to develop a detailed assessment of their financial exposure to future flood inundation based on projections of sea level rise. This webinar introduces attendees to a fine-grained, parcel-based mapping analysis that is being used to predict depths of inundation; model the resulting structural damage; and calculate the per-parcel financial exposure. Parcel-level damage assessments are aggregated to determine a potential municipal tax revenue loss.

This economic analysis of vulnerability serves to open the difficult but critical public policy discussion of the likely impacts of sea level rise. It also creates the basis for developing and prioritizing practical and effective recovery and adaptation strategies and provides a clear and coherent argument for reshaping coastal development patterns to avoid repetitive harm and losses.