New
York Sea Grant Publishes NY Great Lakes Coastal Resilience Index
Newark, N.Y.; January 3, 2020. New York Sea Grant has
published New York’s Great Lakes Coastal
Resilience Index: A Community Self-Assessment guide for understanding how
prepared a community is for coastal flooding and weather disasters such as wind
and ice storms, ice jams, and flash flooding. The publication can be read and downloaded
in the Resource: Tools section of the New York Sea Grant website at http://seagrant.sunysb.edu/articles/r/12972.
New York’s Great Lakes Coastal Resilience Index authored by New York Sea Grant Coastal Community Specialist Mary Austerman is a 44-page, self-assessment tool with supplemental information designed to empower municipal leaders, local planners, engineers, floodplain managers and others to guide discussions about their community’s resilience to coastal hazards.
“New York Sea Grant worked
closely with communities and agency experts to ensure this resource is relevant
to our Great Lakes local governments. Pilot efforts have been received
positively and we look forward to assisting others in using this tool in the
future,” said New York Sea Grant Associate Director and Cornell Cooperative
Extension Assistant Director Katherine Bunting-Howarth, J.D., Ph.D., Ithaca,
N.Y.
Austerman is now scheduling
meetings with communities to assist in their completion of the Coastal Resilience Index. For more
information or to schedule a date, contact Austerman at mp357@cornell.edu or 315-331-8415.
The New York’s Great Lakes Coastal Resilience Index uses readily
available information and includes a nine-page exercise to investigate the
vulnerabilities across six community sectors, including infrastructure,
transportation, community and business plans, mitigation measures, and social
systems.
The guide includes attributes
and descriptions for weather disasters developed with data
from the National Weather
Service and Northeast Regional Climate Center and instructions for using the New
York Sea Grant Lake Ontario Inundation WebMap and Map Package projects so users
can create their own Lake Ontario inundation risk maps.
“This Coastal Resilience Index provides a simple, inexpensive method for
community leaders to perform a self-assessment of their community’s resilience
to coastal flooding and weather disasters and identify weaknesses a community
may want to address prior to the next hazard event,” Austerman said.
In 2019, Austerman (at right in photo) was presented
a Great Lakes Sea Grant Network Outstanding Outreach Programming Award for
excellence in assisting Lake Ontario coastal communities to address record high
water and flooding since 2017. New York Sea Grant was honored for its part in a
Post-Flood Recovery Building Workshop for the Village of Sodus Point with a
2019 Public Outreach Award from the New York Upstate Chapter of the American Planning
Association.
New York Sea Grant is a
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cooperative program of Cornell
University and the State University of New York. To learn more, visit www.nyseagrant.org.
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