South Carolina’s coastline is dynamic and experiences a number of coastal hazards. These hazards create risks for our communities, damage infrastructure, diminish wildlife habitats, and degrade coastal water quality.

The Nature Conservancy's South Carolina chapter has been awarded a prestigious NOAA Transformational Habitat Restoration and Coastal Resilience Grant with the goal of "Transforming the Scale and Equity of Living Shorelines in South Carolina." This initiative aims to expand the use of large-scale natural infrastructure or Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) to enhance coastal resilience against oceanic flooding and erosion. NBS are interventions that use landscape features or incorporate the natural environment, natural features, or natural systems to achieve traditional engineering objectives by working with nature rather than against it. Nature-Based Solutions are landscape strategies that use nature to achieve traditional engineering objectives. Examples of large-scale NBS include floodplain reconnection, strategic flood storage, and beneficial use of dredge material.

One of the primary efforts under the grant will be to develop three Coastal Resilience Implementation Plans (CRIPs) that identify coastal risks, evaluate nature-based projects and approaches to help reduce those risks, and find ways to implement those solutions. The projects will focus on protecting communities and coastal habitat through the use of NBS.

The CRIPs will identify optimal sites for NBS spanning the approximately 200-mile South Carolina coastline. The projects are intended to yield multiple positive outcomes for both communities and natural ecosystems to meet objectives that will be developed through a robust stakeholder engagement process.