City: Charleston, South Carolina

Reporting to: Director of Resiliency

The Challenge

Flood risk is rising across the city of Charleston. It’s driven by the area’s low-lying elevation, rising seas as a result of climate change, aging infrastructure, and growing population. These factors exacerbate the city’s vulnerability to flooding events from storm surges, rainfall, tidal events, and compound occurrences—events which have a significantly larger impact on low-income residents. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Charleston has experienced 13 inches of sea level rise (SLR) in the past 100 years, and the city projects an additional 14 inches of SLR by 2050. The impacts of this flooding are significant and widespread, and they will drive up infrastructure costs, affect affordability, and jeopardize residents’ safety.

To proactively tackle these issues, Charleston has developed a Flooding and Sea Level Rise Strategy, Comprehensive Integrated Water Plan, and Basin Flood Action Program, as well as established strict regulations around development. The city has also invested millions of dollars in infrastructure and drainage projects. In addition, the city has partnered with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to conduct several comprehensive studies on the issue. Charleston’s next priority is to develop a communications action plan that can help residents better understand flood risks, the short- and long-term projects designed to protect their communities from these risks, and where they can find real-time updates during flooding events.

There are a number of different websites and online resources that provide residents with real-time information, but the city lacks a cohesive strategy on how we best communicate all that we do and offer to residents. Key questions that we hope the fellow can helps us answer are the following:

1. How well do we understand residents’ needs in terms of access to data and information about flooding? What information is most valuable to them, at what time and through what channels? How do these needs differ based on resident demographics?
2. How can we work together more collaboratively across city teams to ensure that our communication efforts are effective and seamless?

What You’ll Do

The fellow will work with key stakeholders from across city departments, as well as external partners, to help develop a “One Water” communications strategy on flood risk, flood project planning, project delivery timelines, and flood preparedness—including flood detection, real-time alerts, and response and recovery systems—by consolidating data and information from existing city monitoring systems. This strategy would also help ensure that communications are accessible to underserved, socially vulnerable, and non-English speaking communities.

The fellow will use data and information from existing city resources, including TIDEeye, FloodStat, Rainproof, Adopt a Drain, Flooding and SLR Strategy, Basin Flood Action Program, Comprehensive Integrated Water Plan, and GIS tools. Using these tools, the fellow will help the city think through how to best communicate this information to residents. Beyond an online website/dashboard, this includes exploring other communication tools to residents.

Key deliverables from the fellowship include:

1. Analysis of residents’ information needs, informed by:
   • An audit of all existing data and information resources provided by the city (as listed above)
   • Insights from focus groups/resident feedback and usage data
2. A detailed communications strategy, which includes actionable recommendations for the development of a public dashboard/website that provides residents with the required information, real-time flood mapping, as well as other critical information, such as KPIs and water management report cards or stormwater project schedules and completions. The fellow would also evaluate accessibility of an online dashboard for different demographics and recommendations for alternative channels (and/or language provision).

We hope that the work of the fellow can inform a second phase of work after the summer. The second phase would be centered around developing a comprehensive data collection and monitoring program for rainfall and tide levels in all city basins.

What You’ll Bring

• Communication
• Language proficiency in Spanish (preferred)
• Stakeholder engagement
• Data analysis
• Policy analysis
• Design thinking
• Mapping (GIS)
• Marketing