Prioritizing Infrastructure and Ecosystem Risk from Coastal Processes in Mud Bay (City of Surrey)

City of Surrey is taking a proactive approach to increasing the resilience of Surrey coastal floodplains to the impacts of climate change. The City is developing a Coastal Flood Adaptation Strategy (CFAS), which will identify the current and future climate change and sea level rise effects on Surrey’s low-lying flood-prone areas, as well as develop short, medium and long-term adaptation options to address these impacts. The higher-level CFAS plan is being complemented through sector-specific vulnerability assessments, Prioritizing Infrastructure and Ecosystem Risk from Coastal Processes in Mud Bay (PIER) being one of them. PIER will be implemented to address the need for better understanding of the natural coastal processes in Mud Bay, the status of environmental habitats and specific species, and the vulnerabilities of and risks posed to these ecosystems. PIER will improve the resiliency of shoreline infrastructure and increase collaboration between various organizations.Through PIER, City of Surrey will draw on expertise of several consulting companies and local non-governmental organizations to assess the status of and climate change risks to the natural wetland environments and the associated implications for shoreline infrastructure. By the use of on-site monitoring and assessments, combined with literature review studies, PIER will help the City better understand the threats to these valuable, and particularly vulnerable, estuarine habitats such as salt marshes and eelgrass beds that provide important flood protection. The primary focus of PIER is shoreline infrastructure and the coastal natural areas, the priority flood mitigation action items identified through PIER, once implemented, will have a great potential to provide a host of environmental, social and economic co-benefits to the community: preservation of natural, recreational and agricultural areas; protection of coastal communities’ health and safety; decreased likelihood of infrastructure service disruptions; and general enhancement of flood protection through grey infrastructure and ecosystem services.