Specifications include, but are not limited to: SMPDC, with support from the Wells Reserve and Maine Sea Grant, is leading a two-year project, Climate Ready Coast – Southern Maine, aimed at enhancing the region's resilience to coastal hazards. The goal of the project is to advance coastal resilience planning and action within Maine's ten southern-most coastal communities through development of the state's first regional coastal resilience plan. The plan will address municipal and regional needs and focus on coordinated conservation efforts, sound land use planning, tailored yet transferable adaptation strategies, and nature-based solutions to coastal hazard impacts. Funding for the project is provided through the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) National Coastal Resilience Fund. The project, which began in summer 2021, has engaged municipalities, local land trusts, regional conservation organizations, and federal and state natural resource entities to collaboratively identify regional and local resilience needs assess the impacts of climate change on coastal communities, and develop priority adaptation strategies, hazard mitigation measures, and nature-based solutions for making the region more resilient to coastal hazards. An Advisory Committee of local and state experts and a Working Group consisting of representatives of key stakeholder groups guide and participate in the project. To-date, the project team, with support from the Advisory Committee and Working Group, have evaluated regional and local coastal resilience needs, challenges, barriers, and successes; worked with a consultant to undertake a regional coastal hazard exposure analysis and vulnerability assessment; and identified priority vulnerable locations within the study region. The next phases of the project will entail developing strategies and solutions for addressing vulnerabilities at those priority locations to protect people, infrastructure and natural resources from coastal climate hazards; planning for on-the-ground projects and policies to enhance coastal resilience; advancing the use of nature-based approaches for coastal resilience; and garnering regional support from and collaboration among municipalities, land trusts, and natural resource organizations for coastal resilience action. The consultant, with support from the project team, will identify a suite of coastal resilience strategies and solutions that address a range of coastal vulnerabilities within the project region and account for local conditions and characteristics. Strategies and solutions should include, but not be limited to, nature-based solutions. Further, identified strategies should be representative of the diverse types of exposure, vulnerabilities, and conditions across the study region, as determined and summarized in profile sheets created for areas of elevated coastal vulnerabilities. This will support transferability of adaptation strategies across the project region and beyond. The regional coastal vulnerability decision support tool that was developed in a previous phase of the project will be used by the consultant and team to inform this work. In addition to identifying resilience and adaptation strategies and solutions that are appropriate for the southern Maine coastline, the consultants will develop, with support from the project team, a matrix document (or similar) summarizing information about each strategy, including the site conditions under which each is appropriate, benefits and co-benefits, limitations, challenges, key considerations, cost information when available, and tradeoffs associated with each strategy. The project team envisions that the work product will be similar to the Cape Cod Commission Adaptation Strategies Matrix, but is open to exploring other types of work products to present this information in a user-friendly way that can be embedded in the project's final regional coastal resilience plan.
