NUS Cities Lecture Series 27

Integrated Coastal Management Using Adaptive Planning Principles

After hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf coast in 2005, the State of Louisiana established a new agency, the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, charged with taking a systems approach to sustainable and resilient coastal management. The flagship product of their work is Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast, a 50-year, approximately $50 billion plan to protect the state’s coastal communities from surge-based flooding and reduce land losses caused by erosion, sea level rise, and subsidence. The Master Plan is a living document, updated every 5-6 years, resulting in a continuous, iterative process of model improvement and analysis.

This talk will discuss the state’s integrated, transdisciplinary planning process, highlighting the practical complexities and tradeoffs associated with providing state-of-the-art risk modeling and decision support on a client budget and tight timeline. We will show how our models have evolved over time to meet the Master Plan’s needs and to incorporate a wider range of classical and deep uncertainties.

We will also highlight and explain how estimates of flood depth exceedances and damage have changed over time between Master Plan cycles and in comparison to studies executed by other government agencies. This will demonstrate how sensitive flood risk estimates are to a range of modeling choices, evolving data collection efforts, the ever-expanding historical record of storm events, and other factors. It emphasizes the need for planning efforts to explicitly account for these types of uncertainties.

Prof. David Johnson

Prof. David Johnson is the Ravi and Eleanor Talwar Rising Star Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering and Political Science at Purdue University. He is the social science and policy lead in the Network Coordinating Office for the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure, the organization coordinating operations of major natural hazards experimental facilities (e.g., wind tunnels, earthquake shake tables) in the United States, and a member of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Health, Food, and Agriculture Resilience Consortium. He is also the co-chair of Society for Risk Analysis’ annual meeting. His interdisciplinary research focuses broadly on decision-making under uncertainty with applications in environmental policy and climate change adaptation. Prior to joining Purdue in 2015, he worked for seven years as a policy analyst and mathematician at RAND Corporation.

Date: 21 April 2025, Monday

Location: NUS SDE LT426

Time: 6:30 p.m. SGT - 8:30 p.m. SGT

NUS Cities Lecture Series investigates ideas, policies and projects developed by urban experts, which aspire to create sustainable, resilient, and liveable cities.