What the Profession Needs to Build

COASTAL RESILIENCE SERIES  ·  ARTICLE 5 OF 5

Daniel Pingaro, MLA  ·  Ocean Conservation & Coastal Resilience

This series began with a structural problem, the gap between the policy tools we have and the ecological reality for which we are designing. It moved through the limits of nature-based solutions, the foundational role of community trust, and the liminal character of the coast as a threshold landscape that belongs fully to no single discipline. If there is a thread connecting all of it, it is this: the technical capacity to design good coastal resilience already exists. What is limiting us is not knowledge. It is the organizational, institutional, and leadership infrastructure to deploy that knowledge at the scale and speed the moment requires.

That is a different kind of problem. It requires a different kind of consistent response than we have employed in most situations.

I think the coastal resilience field needs to build a set of concrete capacities that institutions and individuals can develop, fund, and deploy. The urgency is real. The most consequential coastal resilience decisions of the coming years about where to protect, where to restore, and where to begin the conversation about retreat are being made right now, in municipal planning departments and state agency offices and federal rulemaking processes, often without the integration of the complex web of expertise, or community grounding that the decisions require.

Policy Fluency as a Professional Competency

The first capacity is policy fluency not policy expertise in the sense of a law degree or a career in government, but a working literacy in the regulatory frameworks that govern coastal practice, combined with the professional confidence to engage those frameworks as an active participant rather than a passive subject. I believe that most seasoned professionals in this area possess this expertise, but the issue is a clear and demonstrated integration of expert understanding and laypeople on a consistent basis.

This means understanding where the leverage points are in the Coastal Zone Management Act, what the current FEMA flood mapping process means for coastal development decisions in specific regions, and how state-level adaptation planning translates (or fails to translate) into local land use authority. It means knowing which federal and state agency staff are actually driving innovation in permitting for nature-based solutions, and building relationships with them as professional peers rather than seeing them as bureaucratic gatekeepers.

It also means being willing to participate in the rewriting of rules that are not working. The landscape architecture profession has technical knowledge that is directly relevant to coastal regulatory reform. The current revision of FEMA's coastal construction standards, the ongoing development of state managed retreat frameworks in California and elsewhere, the policy infrastructure around blue carbon crediting are processes being shaped right now. They are being shaped largely without the systematic input of the design disciplines that will be asked to implement what they produce.

Policy fluency is not a peripheral skill for coastal practitioners. It is a core competency. Graduate programs, especially those in landscape architecture, would do their students a good service to offer educational programming with policy courses.

Interdisciplinary Leadership, Not Coordination

The second capacity is interdisciplinary leadership — and I want to be precise about what I mean, because coordination is not the same thing. Coordinating a team of coastal engineers, marine scientists, planners, community organizers, and climate scientists is a project management function. Leading that team in a way that produces genuinely integrated work within which the engineering model is informed by the ecology, the policy strategy is actually shaped by the community dynamics, the design actually holds all of it together is fundamentally different.

Interdisciplinary leadership requires intellectual range: enough familiarity with each contributing discipline to understand what it is actually saying, to recognize where its assumptions are being challenged by another discipline's findings, and to facilitate the productive friction that genuine integration requires. It requires the confidence to hold complexity without resolving it prematurely into a single discipline's frame. It also requires a design sensibility to synthesize differing concepts and viewpoints that most disciplinary training does not cultivate.

The coastal resilience field has produced good interdisciplinary researchers. It has produced fewer good interdisciplinary leaders, people who can organize and lead integrated teams on real projects, in real political environments, under real resource constraints, and produce outcomes that are more than the sum of their disciplinary parts. There are clearly professionals who can and do embody this knowledge and leadership, but they are few and far between given the nature of the role. Developing that leadership capacity through training, mentorship, the design of organizations that reward integration rather than disciplinary depth alone is one of the highest-leverage investments we can make.

A Long View on Equity

The third capacity is a long view on equity. The equity failures in coastal resilience are not primarily failures of intention. Most practitioners working in this field are genuinely committed to serving vulnerable communities. The failures are structural and temporal: they are built into the funding mechanisms, the regulatory frameworks, the political economies of coastal development, and the professional incentive structures that shape whose projects get resourced and whose shorelines get protected.

A long view on equity means tracking these structural dynamics over time rather than evaluating individual projects in isolation. It means asking, for any coastal resilience intervention: who bears the cost of this decision, who captures the benefit, and does the answer to those two questions correlate with existing patterns of wealth and political power? It means being willing to identify it when the answer is yes, not as an accusation, but as a diagnostic, as the starting point for designing something different.

It also means building the organizational infrastructure to sustain equity commitments over project timescales. Community trust, as the third article in this series argued, is built over years and can be damaged in a single decision. Sustaining genuine co-design processes requires stable relationships, consistent staffing, and organizational cultures that treat community engagement as a professional discipline rather than a project deliverable. These are institutional design problems as much as ethical ones — and politics exacerbates both.

The Institution the Moment Requires

I have been describing capacities that individual practitioners need to develop. I want to close with a different scale of argument about the kind of institution the coastal resilience field needs, and does not yet have.

What is missing is not more research. The science on sea level rise, storm surge dynamics, nature-based solution performance, and managed retreat is strong and advancing rapidly. What is missing is an institution, or perhaps a distributed network of entities, capable of translating that science into integrated practice at speed. This would be across the jurisdictional and disciplinary silos that currently fragment coastal resilience work, and with the community grounding and equity commitment to ensure that the benefits reach the people most at risk.

That institution would need to operate simultaneously at the design scale, the policy scale, and the community scale. The people within the entity would collectively need to be fluent in science, the law, the design disciplines, and the political dynamics of coastal communities. It would need to be structured for interdisciplinary integration rather than disciplinary depth alone. It would need to be animated by a genuine commitment to the long view on equity, on ecological time, on the coast with which we are actually working.

This is not a description of any existing entity to my knowledge. Some of the pieces exist  within conservation organizations, in research universities, in design practices, in community-based environmental organizations working the front lines of coastal change. The work is to connect them, to develop the integrating framework, and to resource the leadership that can hold it together.

The coast is not waiting for us to sort out our disciplinary boundaries, our funding silos, or our institutional jurisdictions. It is changing on its own timeline, indifferent to ours. The question this series has been circling from the beginning is whether the profession, broadly defined, across design, science, policy, and community practice, is willing to organize itself to meet the coast on its own terms.

That is the work. It is available to anyone willing to take it seriously. The window for doing it well, rather than merely reactively, is shorter than most people are prepared to acknowledge.

This concludes the Coastal Resilience Series. The author welcomes responses, disagreements, and invitations to continue the conversation.

Daniel Pingaro, MLA

Ocean conservation and coastal resilience executive. Former USEPA, CEO of Sailors for the Sea & Ocean Institute, Executive Director Laguna Beach Community Foundation. #CoastalResilience  #Surf #LandscapeArchitecture  #ClimateAdaptation  #NatureBasedSolutions  #OceanConservation  #EnvironmentalPolicy