Glossary for SC CRIP
Adaptation: The process by which a natural or human system adjusts to new or changing conditions to reduce risk. This can be used to refer to changing climatic, environmental, or even cultural conditions.
Adaptive capacity: The ability of a person, asset, or system to adjust to a hazard, take advantage of new opportunities, or cope with change.
Climate: Usually defined as “average weather”, representing long-term trends rather than daily fluctuations in factors such as temperature, precipitation, and wind.
Climate Change: Any significant change in the statistical measures of climate lasting for an extended period of time, meaning major changes in temperature, precipitation, or wind that occur over several decades or longer.
Climate Extreme: Severe conditions of climate, including more intense droughts, stronger hurricanes and storms, heavy rainfall events, extreme heat lasting longer amounts of time or reaching higher temperatures, etc. These conditions are beyond the range of historical norms and have become more frequent.
Coastal hazards: Events or conditions that may negatively impact coastal communities including human injury and/or damage to property and community assets. While hurricanes and tropical systems may impact areas far inland (as demonstrated by the catastrophic damage caused by Hurricane Helene in 2024), communities in close proximity of the ocean are most likely to experience threats from these events. Hazards specific to coastal communities include storm surge, flooding from higher-than-average high tides, and coastal erosion.
Coastal Resilience Implementation Plan (CRIP): A comprehensive strategy for a coastal community to protect its environment, infrastructure, economy, and people from hazards like sea-level rise, storms, and erosion. These plans involve assessing risks, identifying solutions (often emphasizing nature-based approaches like restoring marshes and dunes), implementing projects, and aligning with broader state and federal goals.
Communities: A group of people living in the same area and having common characteristics.
Criteria: Measurable factors that can be used to evaluate success towards meeting project objectives.
Ecosystem: Any natural unit or entity including living and non-living components that interact to produce a stable system.
Equity/Equitable: The fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement for all people, while at the same time striving to identify and eliminate barriers that prevent full participation of some groups. This acknowledges that there are historically underserved and underrepresented populations, and that fairness regarding these unbalanced conditions is necessary to provide equal opportunities to all groups.
Exposure: The presence of people, assets, and ecosystems in places where they could be adversely affected by hazards or stressors affected by climate change.
FEMA Flood Zones: The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is a U.S. federal agency that develops maps that show the probability of flood risk across a geographical area. The zones reflect the severity and likelihood of flooding in a specific area.
Flooding/Inundation: The submergence of land by water, particularly in a coastal setting. Flooding may be caused by storm surge, tidal water, rainfall, stormwater runoff, or a combination of factors called compound flooding.
Goal: Broader vision for the project outcomes for what the project will achieve over the long term, used to guide general project decisions.
Geographic Information System (GIS): Computer-based system that captures, stores, analyzes, and visualizes geographically referenced information. These systems allow for data to be collected on many different factors and shown spatially on a map.
Landscape-scale: Landscape-scale refers to large projects that are intended to address multiple goals across a variety of ecosystems, as compared to projects that focus on individual sites or species.
Large-Scale: Covering a wide geographic area. For this project, large-scale generally refers to over 10 acres in size. This factor is to encourage the development of projects that provide a significant benefit to the community.
Living Shoreline: A type of nature-based solution that protects and stabilizes a shoreline using natural materials such as oyster shell and native salt marsh vegetation to help mitigate flooding and shoreline erosion while maintaining or developing habitat.
Climate Mitigation: A human intervention to reduce the human impact on Earth’s climate system. Commonly used to refer to the processes that can reduce the amount and speed of future climate change by reducing emissions of heat-trapping gases or removing them from the atmosphere.
Flood Mitigation: Lowering the likelihood of flood risk either through behavioral or structural changes.
Multiple benefits: Multiple benefits, or multi-benefits, refers to a project’s ability to provide environmental, economic, cultural and/or social benefits while increasing resilience.
Nature-based solutions: Nature-based solutions (NBS) are engineered practices that utilize nature and natural systems to help protect communities from environmental hazards while also often providing social and economic benefits. They may also be referred to as “Green Infrastructure” or “Natural Infrastructure”.
Objective: Specific, measurable goal that defines what a project aims to accomplish within a set timeframe.
Projection: Analysis-based estimates of future climate conditions, often used to describe potential future scenarios and determine the most efficient or cost-effective solutions under these potential future conditions.
Resilience: The ability of ecosystems and communities to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from environmental changes and hazards, particularly those caused by climate change, with minimal damage to social well-being, the economy, and the environment.
Risk: The potential for adverse consequences of a hazard on a community or ecosystem, and it can be influenced by climate change and other external factors. Risk considers the likelihood that an area would be affected by a hazard and the consequence that the hazard would have on wellbeing and security to the assets or people affected.
Scenario: Frame possible future conditions, the underlying forces that drive them, and potential outcomes of various mitigation or adaptation actions. Scenarios can help to understand costs and benefits in different regions and population demographics.
Sea level rise: Increase in the global average sea level caused by the addition of water from melting glaciers and ice sheets, thermal expansion of ocean water, and the shift of water from land to ocean from groundwater extraction. This rise is primarily driven by global warming, which contributes to the melting of ice caps and glaciers, leading to increased water volume in the ocean. Sea level rise poses significant threats to coastal ecosystems, infrastructure, and communities.
Sensitivity: The degree to which a system, population, or resource is or might be affected by hazards or stressors.
Traditional engineering: Used to refer to “hard” engineering solutions or “grey infrastructure” often used for coastal protection and shoreline stabilization, including rip rap, sea walls, or bulkheads.
Transformational: Related to a major change or shift in community mindset , ecological function or governance that has a sustained and significant impact on the community and environment. Transformational changes do not only apply to natural systems but also contribute to making systemic change in the form of policy changes, fostering collaboration, or changing the way communities and decision makers view nature-based solutions.
Transition: The process or period of changing from one state to another, referring to transitioning land use or habitat as the environment shifts and challenges emerge for continuation of the current system.
Uncertainty: A state of incomplete knowledge. There are uncertainties about how future conditions may change due to a high level of complexity and challenges predicting how the environment may change, and the decisions society will make.
Vulnerability: The predisposition of assets to be adversely affected by hazards. Vulnerability combines exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity to determine how and to what degree a system would experience negative effects from a given hazard.