Community Engagement for Coastal Resilience, with Celso Ferreira and Elizabeth Van Dolah

Notable Quotes

• Pocomoke is a valuable case study for the rural United States: “[Pocomoke City’s] roots are in this industrial, rural landscape, and it’s still very much an important part of their identity. But a lot of rural places in the United States have gone through an economic decline over the last century. Today, they’re trying to figure out ways to redevelop and to find new kinds of economic-development opportunities that could bring new kinds of prosperity.” —Elizabeth Van Dolah (9:31)
• What to listen for in focus groups: “We wanted to understand how flooding is currently affecting them. And not just in a physical way, but in a socioeconomic way, in a cultural way. How are flooding and other socioenvironmental circumstances affecting their capacity to advance this vision of a healthy, thriving community into the future?” —Elizabeth Van Dolah (13:18)
• Integrating community involvement on the engineering side: “Basically, we’re trying to answer three questions: Where’s the water coming from? Where’s the water going? And what are we going to do about it? And the community has a say in all three parts of flood modeling.” —Celso Ferreira (15:35)
• Community input illuminates where efforts can be the most useful: “Sometimes, the community has different worries [than engineers], and that’s one thing that I learned that I didn’t know when I started working with communities. They weren’t necessarily worried about the engineering design standard, but they were worried about things that impacted them.” —Celso Ferreira (17:23)

Top of the Stack

• “Building coastal resilience in Pocomoke City, Maryland” by Celso Ferreira, Andre de Souza de Lima, Diana Veronez, Elizabeth Van Dolah, Joseph Galarraga, Ayanna Healy, Margaret Walls, Emma DeAngeli, and Nicole Carlozo
• “Recreation and Resilience: When Parks Do Double Duty” by Emma DeAngeli and Margaret Walls
• “Nature-Based Solutions 101” by Emma DeAngeli, Brandon Holmes, and Margaret Walls
• A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness by Michael Pollan
• Goat movie

The Full Transcript

Margaret Walls: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future (RFF). I’m your host, Margaret Walls.

My guests today are Dr. Elizabeth Van Dolah and Dr. Celso Ferreira. Elizabeth, who goes by Liz, is an anthropologist and a community engagement expert who works on rural environmental challenges, and Celso is a professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering at George Mason University, where he directs the Mason Flood Hazards Research Lab.

So, you all might wonder why an anthropologist and an engineer are on the show together, and what could they possibly have in common, but it’s a lot, actually. Liz and Celso have worked together on projects in the Chesapeake Bay region that focus on finding solutions to coastal flooding in communities that are affected by sea level rise. I invited them on the show today to talk specifically about a project that’s funded by a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, that we here at RFF worked on together with them, so I know a lot about this project. This project was centered on finding nature-based solutions to flooding in a small rural community in Maryland called Pocomoke City.

So, I’m just going to give a little background about the basics of Pocomoke for listeners who aren’t familiar with the geography of Maryland. Pocomoke City is way down on the lower part of the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. It’s almost to the Virginia border, and it’s about 150 miles from Washington, DC, or Baltimore. This is a small town, it has a population of about 4,400, and it lies along a tidal river, the Pocomoke River. Sea level rise in Maryland—I’m sure Celso might mention this—but it’s some of the highest on the East Coast. And this part of the state, which is the lower eastern shore, is very low-lying and flood prone. So, the effects of sea level rise are going to be felt pretty acutely in that region.

I’m going to ask Celso to give a little more background on the study in just a minute, but the reason I invited the two of them on the show together is to tell us about doing community-level work. We really did a lot of community engagement in this project: community-level work on resilience that brings together both state-of-the-art flood modeling with what I would call “patient and detailed” community engagement. So, we’re going to learn about what that looks like, how to do this interdisciplinary community-engaged work, and what are the challenges and the opportunities. Stay with us.

Hello, Liz and Celso. Welcome to Resources Radio. Thanks for coming on the show.

Elizabeth Van Dolah: Thanks for having me.

Celso Ferreira: Thanks for having me, Margaret. It’s a pleasure.

Margaret Walls: We always start with a get-to-know-you question. So Liz, tell us a little bit about how you got into what you’re doing. I’ll start with you.

Elizabeth Van Dolah: Yeah, so I might go way back to my beginnings. I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, where flooding is a huge challenge. As a child, I witnessed the slow progression of sea level rise, and it got to the point where my parents actually decided to sell my childhood home and move inland. They traded tidal water for a freshwater lake because it became so stressful and uncertain. And so, I can really relate to the personal experience that a lot of people that live on these coastlines are dealing with and the anxiety that comes with that, and the loss that comes with that, too. And that’s what really drove me to get into this work.

I went to the University of Maryland, College Park for my graduate studies. Through that, I got to be part of a really amazing collaborative initiative called the Deal Island Peninsula Partnership, which brought together all different types of stakeholders with an interest in the resilience of the Deal Island Peninsula—which is not that far from Pocomoke City on the Lower Eastern Shore of Maryland—and really tried to bring together an expansive network of diverse experiences, opinions, tools, and knowledge, to inform how we advance resilience. I found that collaborative approach to be really powerful and something that I wanted to continue to pursue in my professional work.

And I worked for the Nature Conservancy Maryland/DC chapter, where I supported our former Coastal Resilience program. My job there was to build community-based resilience programming to advance community resilience in these places that don’t have a lot of capacity and are on the front lines of these changes. And so, that’s how I got here.

Margaret Walls: Yeah, that’s great. I remember you telling me about Charleston, that you’re from Charleston.

Celso, what’s your story? How did you get into what you’re doing?

Celso Ferreira: So, I actually grew up surfing along the Brazilian coast, and I just loved being around water. As I was growing up, there were a lot of rivers and water around my hometown. And I started to notice this love-and-hate relationship that we have with water. It was like, sometimes it’s so much fun, but then when there’s storms, there’s so much energy and impact we can see to people and infrastructure.

When I started my engineering career, I started to find ways to be more engaged with water and connect my natural passion, my personal passion, with the engineering that I was studying. And I soon learned there were classes about waves and classes about environmental engineering. I just dove right in and started to learn as much as I could about the subject. And when I started my PhD at Texas A&M University, Hurricane Ike impacted the Texas coast right in that first month, and I got to see, firsthand, my first hurricane. It was just like, whoa, this is really impactful to see nature and infrastructure, the two things that I was studying. And from there, I just kept studying.

The funny fact is, when I joined George Mason University in 2012, my first year as an assistant professor, Hurricane Sandy impacted the East Coast. I was just on my second month on the job, and I’m driving up and down the coast. Before the storm, I was working with the United States Geological Survey [USGS], deploying sensors—and that was really early on when we were measuring storm surges—and it was just fascinating to see the preparation and the impact this storm had in New York and all those areas. So, I had to go and survey that.

So, it’s just been a fascinating story. It’s like 20 years in now.

Margaret Walls: Right, right. I think I remember you doing the measurement stuff.

Celso Ferreira: Yeah.

Margaret Walls: We’ve known each other for a while.

All right. Well, I gave a little tiny bit of background, but Celso, talk about how this project came about, if you would. What was the impetus for it, and how did this come about?

Celso Ferreira: Right. So, this is a project funded by NOAA with the Effects of Sea Level Rise Program, which is a fantastic program, by the way. I really like how it provides an opportunity for us to do collaborative, interdisciplinary work.

We actually started with a larger project before this project, where we looked into the effects of marshes and wetlands to protect the state of Maryland from coastal flooding. So, we did this regional analysis in collaboration with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and The Nature Conservancy. We looked at the entire state, and we looked at the marshes and their value for natural protection against coastal storms.

When we finished that project, the same program had a second call, and that’s the call that was more focused toward working with local communities and providing this direct assistance to local communities that were being impacted by coastal flooding. That’s when I thought about Margaret and Resources for the Future. And then we assembled the same team we had, plus Resources for the Future, because we realized we really needed to incorporate the economics side of this and the viability of these solutions. So, we started to work at a local scale, and that’s when we started to look for communities that could be good candidates and really needed … They were impacted by coastal flooding or flooding in general, but also were in need of the system that our team could provide.

Margaret Walls: Yeah, it was supposed to be for communities that were disadvantaged and underserved. So, we went to Pocomoke City, that’s where we identified. And I explained where it is, Liz, but tell us a little bit more about it, sociodemographic things and stuff, if you can.

Elizabeth Van Dolah: Yeah. So, this is a community that’s, as Margaret mentioned, on the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland, which is an area that culturally is very much rooted in these working landscapes—working waterfronts, working agricultural lands—and Pocomoke is really in the center of all that, and, historically, was an economic hub supporting a lot of those working landscapes.

So, they were located right along the Pocomoke River, which is Maryland’s deepest river, and it’s also tidally influenced. And because of that, it provided a ripe opportunity for them to get really into shipbuilding. So, shipbuilding was an important part of their historical economy, but they were also right along two really important rail lines that carried goods up and down the East Coast.

And so, their roots are really in this industrial, rural landscape, and it’s still very much an important part of their identity today. But a lot of rural places in the United States, right now, they’ve gone through an economic decline over the last century. Today, they’re trying to figure out ways to redevelop and to find new kinds of economic development opportunities that could bring new kinds of prosperity.

They pride themselves in their tight-knit nature. Their little tagline is, “We’re the friendliest town on the Eastern Shore.” I think that’s something they’re really proud of, and something that they want to protect into the future, but they also see a lot of opportunity around recreation and ecotourism and things like that in their future.

Margaret Walls: Yeah. Some of that came out in these meetings that we had. So, tell us about the community advisory committee. Liz, you can take that one on, too. How did we pull this group together? How many people? And yeah, these were actual … I want to make the point, it wasn’t just town officials. We did start with them, but these were community members. So, tell us a little bit more about that.

Elizabeth Van Dolah: Yeah. So, we were really intentional in trying to bring together a really diverse group of community members—people who were in elected positions, who were on city staff, but also people who were real advocates for their community and were invested in seeing a vision forward for their community. And we wanted to make sure that we had a nice representative group that could bring perspectives from different corners of the community. So, we had faith leaders, we had business owners, we had teachers and youth development leaders. We even had a youth representative on our committee, too, who brought perspectives from the younger generations in Pocomoke.

We had about 15 people—some of them had to step in and step out at various points—and we brought them together working closely with a former city planner who helped us identify the key sectors that we needed to have represented here, and who would be really good to represent those voices. We also got recommendations from people that we were recruiting along the way. And we ended up with this really stellar group of folks who came together.

Margaret Walls: They were pretty engaged, yeah. So, talk about the meetings, because I feel like I really learned more about how to do community engagement. It’s painstaking, actually, and you did a lot of work on that. Can you describe, without going into huge amounts of detail, what was the process that you used in those meetings?

Elizabeth Van Dolah: We were, again, trying to be really intentional about facilitating a co-production process in this project that really empowered this diverse group of people, many of whom aren’t usually at these kinds of tables thinking about resilience planning, inviting them to help guide us, and bringing their local expertise to inform how we were developing the models, how we were evaluating benefits and costs. And so, we led three different workshops to incorporate their insights and help guide us along the way. It was a really iterative process.

So, we first started by just trying to make space to listen and learn from them. How do they define their vision of a healthy, thriving community in the future? We used those insights to define some resilience goals that they helped validate for us.

We also wanted to understand how flooding is currently affecting them. And not just in a physical way, but in a socioeconomic way, in a cultural way. How is flooding and other socioenvironmental circumstances affecting their capacity to advance this vision of a healthy, thriving community into the future?

They helped us, through those conversations, better understand the suite of critical assets that define their community strengths and weaknesses. So, these include physical assets, the built infrastructure, and also natural infrastructure that they have in their backyard. But also, these intangible assets. Their social networks, their leadership capacity, their human resources, their money in the bank. These things are also really important to enable them to advance their goals forward, and flooding is having a direct impact on those dimensions of their capacity. And so, we really wanted to bring that into our evaluation.

How does flooding in the future affect their capacity to advance their vision of a healthy, thriving community? And then, how might nature-based solutions improve those conditions in the future? I think that helped to center their perspectives and helped us to ground this project in a way that really spoke to their goals and spoke to their experiences of vulnerability that allowed us to deliver useful outcomes in …

Margaret Walls: Useful outcomes that they had contributed to.

Elizabeth Van Dolah: Right, right.

Margaret Walls: That resonates. Okay. We might come back to a couple questions on that, but Celso, hey, I’ve been trying to get you on this show for a long time. I have been eager for you to talk about the ins and outs of flood modeling.

I know we don’t have a lot of time to go into everything, but tell us about how you went about doing it in Pocomoke. What were some of the processes that you went through in your team of people, which you can help to mention, but what are some of the steps for looking at flooding in the community now and in the future with climate change? Can you talk about that?

Celso Ferreira: I think, basically, we’re trying to answer three questions. Where’s the water coming from? Where’s the water going? And what are we going to do about it? And the community has a say in all these parts of flood modeling. So, I’ll try to talk a little bit about each of these parts, but if I forget to say how the community gets involved, remind me at the end, because I want to go back to that. It’s really important to this project, because traditional engineering, most of the time, we’ll do those three phases without much community engagement. So this is, I think, an important part of this project.

So, the first thing to think about is where the water is coming from. And you might think that’s a basic question, but in these coastal communities, there’s really three main sources of water that might be impacting communities.

We can think about coastal flooding, which is water coming from the bay itself, driven by storm tides, astronomical tides, or even waves, depending on where the community is located.

Then there is pluvial flooding, which is rainfall directly falling on top of the city. Any part of that that’s not infiltrated generates runoff, and that can impact infrastructure and cause flooding.

And the other one is riverine flooding, which is similar to pluvial flooding in a way, but that’s mostly … Some places are by a larger river, and that rainfall might be happening upstream—not necessarily directly over the watershed city—but that’s draining through the river, and that river might get full and impact areas by the river.

So, when we do flood-modeling engineering, we need to consider which sources are relevant, and which sources we’re going to incorporate, and then we need to incorporate those into the model.

The next thing we think about is how much water. So, where is it coming from, but how much water? What does that mean? We can think about it from a very straightforward engineering perspective, the 100-year-storm design. So, that’s a probabilistically defined water level or storm that we’re going to say, “Look, if we’re going to design a levy, we’re going to design it under this probability.”

But sometimes, the community has different worries, and that’s one thing that I learned that I didn’t know when I started working with communities. They weren’t necessarily worried about the engineering design standard, but they were worried about things that impacted them.

And sometimes there were just high tides—the high tide every month, the king tide—or there were just different variations that were really impacting the community, and they were like, “Well, you know what? We’re worried about the flood that happens every year.” Or, “We are worried about the big storm, the biggest ever storm.” So, that’s where we can get community feedback to tailor the design and the solutions that we’re thinking about to things that they really care about.

So, once we know how much water and where the water is coming from, that’s what we call, in the technical term, “boundary conditions” to our model. We then try to figure out where that water is going. In order to do that, we need to first know the landscape. So, we need to know the topography. And we use these files, for lack of a better word, called digital elevation models, which represent the surface of the earth. So, with that, and by using basic physics of how the water moves downstream, we can put together a numerical model that will tell us where the water is going to flow and where the water is going to go given that “how much water” that we decided.

Here’s where it gets interesting in most of these communities. That water is also interacting with the stormwater infrastructure. So, there are pipes, there are things like culverts, and there’s ditches. There’s lots of ditches that were put in place a long time ago, and sometimes we don’t know where they are. And sometimes the city doesn’t know, necessarily, where they are and the size of them and how all that works. So, that’s a big challenge when we’re doing that. And that was one of the recommendations from this project, is to actually go back and try to learn a little more about where those things are. There’s some assumptions that we need to make, but once we have that, we then have a computer model that’s capable of telling us how the water behaves in that given city, and then we can think about what we can do about it.

So, we can test different adaptation strategies, and that’s also where the community comes in. It’s like, “Well, we would like to see this,” or, “We would like to test that.” Or, “Why don’t we think about that?” And we can go back and forth with that, and we can show, “Look, if we do this, this is the benefit in terms of flooding protection that you get,” and then we can discuss and analyze that.

The other thing that I forgot to mention—and knew I wanted to come back to—is in part two, where we’re trying to figure out how the model works and where things are, community also becomes really important, because sometimes they do know, and they can come to us and say, “There’s a culvert right here, because I drive over it every time.” Or, “There’s a flood problem right here, because we see it every month.” And we can put that into our model-development framework and incorporate that into our models.

Margaret Walls: So, if somebody tells you—and I know they did do this with the mapping exercises that you designed and stuff, Liz—but if somebody says, “That road always floods when there’s a high tide,” you can go to the model and kind of build that information in?

Celso Ferreira: Absolutely. Or, at least stress-test the model to see if the model is telling us that that road is flooding like they’re saying.

Margaret Walls: I see.

Celso Ferreira: And then there’s some interaction, right? Then it’s like, either we’re missing something, or the model was already correct and we already knew that, and we’re good to go, or we need to go back and figure out, well, maybe there’s something we’re missing here that we didn’t have before.

Margaret Walls: Okay. Well, tell us about some of the findings, then. I’ll start with you, but I want to ask both of you to talk about that. But, what did we learn about the extent of the problem there, and where it is, and that sort of thing? Celso?

Celso Ferreira: So, once you start doing this for a while—and I don’t want to tell my age here—but you start to anticipate things that you’re going to see. So, going into these projects, I already can look at it and kind of have a sense like, “I think we’re going to see this type of flood problem,” just by knowing where they are and the topography and all of that. And some of it was confirmed, but some of it was pretty new to me.

So, a couple of things that we figured out was there were existing stormwater problems: lack of maintenance and localized puddling, things that are very fixable and normal in these places because there’s just not enough capacity and funding, and there’s many problems, and flooding is one of the list. So, those are fixable and easier, I think, for lack of a better word, but those are more addressable, and we kind of expected that.

The other thing that we learned that I didn’t know, because I haven’t worked in Pocomoke City, is they have a lot of high ground, which is really great in this area of the Chesapeake because a lot of communities are in very, very, very low ground. And the city does have a lot of high ground, which is, I think, a huge strength for them into the future. When we think about resilience into the future, they have a lot of high ground.

But the other thing that I saw was the place they most value, and the place they were most concerned about in a lot of feedback that we got, was the place that flooded the most. That’s exactly the lowest point in the city, and that was the place that was impacted by all three hazards that I just described. So, that’s the perfect storm where we have coastal flooding, riverine flooding, and the urban drainage, all draining to that exact point. And that’s their park.

That’s the place they wanted to protect that provided them their identity, and that really challenged my engineering mindset, because it was like, whoa, that’s exactly where all the water wants to be.

Margaret Walls: Yeah. Liz, you want to add to that a little or talk more about that? The name of the park is Cypress Park. It’s about nine acres. Go ahead. Or you can talk about other things, but I wanted to ask you to say something more about that.

Elizabeth Van Dolah: Yeah, it definitely was their biggest concern. And I think it’s because, not only is it an important part of their identity, but it’s where they have invested so much of their energy around economic development opportunities tied to recreation and ecotourism. And all of a sudden—well, not all of a sudden, but increasingly so—they can’t use this park. And it was a place where the Great ... I apologize, I can’t remember how they name it, but the Great Cypress Fair [Pocomoke City Cypress Festival] used to be there.

Margaret Walls: They had to move that fair. Yeah.

Elizabeth Van Dolah: They had to move it. We heard stories about having picnics there and social gatherings; their beloved pickleball courts are there, and there are these beautiful trails that run through cypress forest stands that you don’t get to see in a lot of places around Maryland. And so, it’s quite a special place on a number of different levels, but they’re losing it. They’re losing their ability to use it.

So, one of the things that I think was really important about bringing this focus on capacity is that it helped us to unravel the “so what?” of this. What are we losing with this park? It isn’t just this important park space, but it’s all these other dimensions that are an important part of how they define their vision for their future. I think they really helped us to better understand the significance of that impact and to bring that into our evaluation and recommendations for their future pathways.

Margaret Walls: Celso, you mentioned there is some higher ground in this community, and I think some of the results of the modeling suggest that they don’t have as serious a problem as some communities do on the Eastern Shore.

And so, one of the issues that came up—Liz, I want you to tell us a little bit more about this—is thinking that perhaps that community could be kind of a “receiving area,” or see population growth from places that are going to get hit harder. What do we hear about that, and what do you want to tell us about that?

Elizabeth Van Dolah: Yeah, I think it was neat to see our community advisory committee members’ reaction to the model outputs, because I think they were all very pleasantly surprised that, “Oh, our future actually doesn’t look so dire.” And yeah, I think that there’s some real opportunity to be strategic in becoming … One of their big goals is to become, once again, this thriving economic/cultural hub on the lower shore. And here’s this opportunity to get really strategic around how you design for that.

I think part of doing that requires, also, creating these attractors like ecotourism, like business investments. And when your one main recreational asset is flooding all the time, how can we get creative in how we think about how we could transition or transform the uses of that so that it can support those kinds of opportunities? They might look a little different, but that will help them, I think, position themselves well to be a receiving community in the future.

Margaret Walls: Yeah. We weren’t able to look into this, but one of the recommendations was that they think about reimagining that park as a different kind of park. We did a little bit of work on that here at RFF about highlighting cities that have come up with what are usually called “stormwater parks,” which are designed to flood, but are also recreational assets. So who knows, maybe they will explore that.

So, the last question want to ask you all, if you can answer, is some lessons learned from this project for how to do this kind of work, which was a research project, with an interdisciplinary team—somebody from the State of Maryland, as you mentioned, the Department of Natural Resources—and heavy community engagement.

So, what do you all think are some lessons learned, or maybe things you’d do differently, or just lessons for other researchers? Liz, you want to start with that?

Elizabeth Van Dolah: Yeah. I guess in thinking about this question, I keep reflecting on how hard it was to find a community to work with. We really wanted to prioritize a community that needed some additional support, because they’re disadvantaged, don’t have a lot of resources. And it’s incredibly hard to find places that have enough capacity to collaborate on a project like this, but still have that need. And even in finding Pocomoke, it took a lot of work to get this project off the ground because of challenges that they were dealing with internally within their municipality, with loss of staff and other important resources that they needed in order to be able to engage in the way we hoped they could.

Maybe one big lesson is just being attentive to that. I think it would’ve been valuable for us, had we had more time at the beginning, to invest in the relationship building before we tried to jump-start this project.

Margaret Walls: Yeah, good point. Really good point. Anything you want to add to that, Celso, or things that you think about?

Celso Ferreira: So I think, to me, it starts with having a wonderful team, which we did. So, thank you both for being part of this effort. And I think also having a supporting funding agency. So, I wanted to thank NOAA and the Effects of Sea Level Rise for being supporting agents for this type of work, which I think is really important.

But also, building trust. And that’s why having time … Building trust with the community takes time, and it takes a lot of work. I think for people with an engineering mindset or background like myself, that’s not our ordinary type of workload. So, incorporating that into our workload and time and all of that, I think it’s really important. It really helps to have a successful project at the end.

Margaret Walls: I think your point about having a really great team, that we all got along and we have weekly meetings and so forth, that’s really important. When you’re coming from completely different disciplines, to appreciate each other’s point of view and learn how to work together is another piece of it. Not just the community engagement, but the different disciplines.

Well, we’re running out of time here, so we want to end the podcast with our Top of the Stack feature. I want to ask you both what you might be reading or listening to, or watching, or something you just might want to share with listeners. Liz?

Elizabeth Van Dolah: Yeah. So, I just started Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness, and it is a fascinating book. Highly recommend it. There’s a really great interview with him that Krista Tippett did on her podcast, On Being. Really interesting conversation, and it’ll give you a little preview into the book.

Margaret Walls: Okay, great. Celso, do you have anything for us?

Celso Ferreira: I love it, Liz. That was great. I’m so jealous.

So, I actually have two teenage daughters that suck up my time completely outside of work, and all I do is drive them around and watch whatever they want to watch whenever we have time to watch TV. So, the last thing we watched was Goat. I thought that was kind of cool. So, if you’re looking for something on Netflix, check that out.

Margaret Walls: All right. Liz Van Dolah and Celso Ferreira, it’s been a pleasure having you on Resources Radio talking about this truly interdisciplinary community-engaged work. I really appreciated it. And thanks so much for coming on the show.

Celso Ferreira: Thank you.

Elizabeth Van Dolah: Thank you for having us.

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