Coastal ecosystems, like mangroves, tidal wetlands, and coral reefs, provide valuable ecosystem services to coastal communities, including protecting them from coastal flooding during extreme events. Understanding when, how, and where these ecosystems act as effective flood defenses will facilitate their use and management as nature-based approaches for adapting to coastal hazards. However, several obstacles in our engineering and scientific understanding of these dynamic systems prevent the widespread use of nature-based adaptation approaches. In this talk, I will provide an overview of what we know so far about the role coastal ecosystems play in flood protection, the limits and constraints of this role, and some of the key challenges in using and managing ecosystems as nature-based adaptation.

Dr. Siddharth (Sid) Narayan hails from Chennai, a tropical coastal city in South India where he completed his bachelor’s in civil engineering. Since then, he has lived and worked in coastal cities, towns, and beaches of varying sizes all around the world. He obtained an Erasmus Mundus MSc in coastal engineering and management from Delft Technical University in the Netherlands and a Ph.D. in coastal flooding from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. He then moved to the Pacific coast, where he was a research scientist on coastal adaptation and nature-based solutions at the University of California in Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Coastal Studies at East Carolina University (ECU), based out of the Coastal Studies Institute on Roanoke Island in North Carolina.

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