Caribbean decision makers need state of the art tools and data to plan for a disaster-resilient future. This research enhances decision-making capacity by providing a hurricane and sea level rise assessment for vulnerable coastal infrastructure. This includes airports, cruise ship terminals, power plants, and maritime infrastructure that are vital for island economies and access. The Caribbean is one of the most natural-disaster prone regions worldwide. In the 2017 hurricane season, it suffered extensive damage to structures and critical services (e.g., water, telecommunications, energy, and transport). Such hazard events pose significant risk to sustainable development as well as major economic sectors (e.g., tourism, agriculture and international commerce). The approach created is a method to identify and geo-spatially classify critical coastal infrastructure in a standardized and replicable fashion. Using input from infrastructure managers, it will establish a new standard to create geospatial data to assess infrastructure change, risk, and other research questions suitable for the regional scale, but with sufficient resolution such that individual facilities can utilize data for local-scale analysis. Specifically, the approach creates, delineates and validates coastal infrastructure components so that exposure and risk can be determined. This work will facilitate and support the development of local and regional plans for resiliency of these critical assets and and help decision makers prioritize resilience investment decisions in the coming decades.

The inventory and risk assessment provides a single, comprehensive source for data of lands deemed as critical coastal infrastructure. It will allow screening and prioritization of areas for resilience interventions. Users can obtain local sea level and flood risk projections and maps from Climate Central, and capture results in formats that are easily shared (e.g., in presentations, constituent or leader communications) and can be used by:

• Regional institutions, climate change centers and consultancy firms for Vulnerability and Capacity Assessments (VCAs) as part of their analysis to fashion adaptation options for coastal infrastructure;
• the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) and national and international disaster management agencies with a mandate to pursue a disaster risk reduction strategy in the region;
• regional negotiators at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) formulating a modality for the establishment of a research and development facility under the umbrella of the convention;
• insurance community, including the Caribbean Catastrophic Risk Insurance Facility (CARIF), interested in developing a risk profile for the Caribbean;
• private sector companies with coastal assets of those tasked with making investment decisions and or constructing credit ratings; the general public.

The risk assessment analysis will show screening and prioritization of different areas for resilience interventions. Users can obtain local sea level rise and flood risk projections and flood risk area maps from Climate Central, and capture these results in formats that are easily shared (e.g., presentations, constituent, or leader communication).