Planning in the age of change

Here's the deal - many global cities are affected by some sort of flood risk, due to the initial convenience of location next to water. To protect them, areas enforce resilience against the hazards and CC. There are three ways to do so - adapt, mitigate, and retreat (fight, adjust, or run). Protection works as an urgent reaction, often insufficient as the risks increase. Retreat on the other end of the spectrum is rational considering nature taking over, but people are not that rational in choices. Mitigation represents a “middle way” between economic and environmental interests, as it integrates such policies as nature-based solutions for the possible benefits of a community onshore.

Question is how we assess these NbS benefits to assure the economic resilience of a place and design the shores accordingly. And - what community assets these shores will be protecting to enforce environmental resilience. I thought these are neat for my thesis research. Idea - to design an adaptive algorithm suggesting the best NbS/ living shorelines for an area based on the local context, and assessing their protective performance.

There`s a neat finding I've made. The importance of ecosystem-based adaptation is globally acknowledged, but the places such as Charleston cannot fully take the risk and implement them for the lack of knowledge on performance. I found multiple complex and sometimes user-friendly  hydrologic, geospatial, and economic models explaining NbS, but they exist in parallel realities. Grasshopper by now works well to communicate this ever-updating set of models adaptively. But - as much as I was looking for the hints to conduct my model, there were no other scripts alike identified. Either we are just becoming fully comprehensive in designing living shorelines, or in the era of high-accuracy parametric modeling we naturally still rely on observations only?