CIVIC-PG Track A: Assessing the Performance of Green Stormwater Infrastructure for Climate Adaptation and Coastal Resilience in the City of Cape Canaveral, Florida

This project plans to establish an urban hydrology monitoring network within the City of Cape Canaveral, Florida, through a participatory charrette process. Like many coastal communities, Cape Canaveral is confronted with the stressors of growing flood risk and harmful algal blooms in nearshore waters. A combination of antiquated infrastructure in the built environment and accelerating climate change is amplifying the impacts of both urban flooding and algal blooms, resulting in increasing threats to public safety, ecosystem health, and private property.

The Cape Canaveral municipal government, in collaboration with its academic and community partners, is planning to design, implement, monitor, and assess nature-based green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) as an approach for mitigating these current and future stressors. This GSI monitoring network will provide important benefits for Cape Canaveral and the broader Indian River Lagoon watershed of eastern Florida, while also demonstrating opportunities for optimizing and assessing GSI performance in similarly vulnerable coastal locations.

GSI refers to a set of stormwater management practices that are designed to maintain, restore, and/or mimic pre-development hydrologic conditions within built environments. These practices are being increasingly promoted as a tool for reducing flood risk, improving water quality, enhancing urban habitat, and creating valuable green space amenities. However, GSI has not yet been adopted at scale in much of the U.S., including areas – like much of coastal Florida – where existing stormwater infrastructure systems are largely maladapted to climate change-driven flood risks and often identified as a primary pollutant load source into impaired aquatic ecosystems.

A relative lack of monitoring and performance data, ambiguous permitting design standards, and misunderstood maintenance protocols are all commonly cited as key barriers to the wider application of GSI, in Florida and elsewhere. To help overcome these barriers, Cape Canaveral is motivated to serve as a partner and host for an applied research program that comprehensively tests the field performance of GSI interventions for mitigating locally severe stormwater-based flooding and non-point nutrient load issues.

Key research goals for the fully implemented project include characterization of stormwater infiltration rate-capacity, areal nutrient-load reduction performance, and public valuation of GSI systems as a municipal amenity. Results are anticipated to facilitate greater GSI research and adoption in the imperiled Indian River Lagoon watershed, home to 1.5 million people and often described as the most biodiverse estuary in North America, and broadly impact the evolution of GSI monitoring practices in urbanized coastal communities across the world.

This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program—Track A. Living in a changing climate: pre-disaster action around adaptation, resilience, and mitigation—and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.