Building Coastal Resilience is one of the first Frontier areas for exploration launched by the MIT Climate Project in 2025 through a Request for Proposals issues to MIT faculty and principal investigators.
Kijal, Terengganu, Malaysia (Image; Pox Rie, Pexels)
Problem and Impact
Coastal regions house nearly 40% of the world’s population and drive major global economic activity, yet they face rising seas, stronger storms, erosion, and the loss of natural buffers. These risks could affect 360 million people and generate $1 trillion in annual losses by 2050.
However, today’s investments focus heavily on hard infrastructure that is costly, rigid, and often mismatched to local needs. To protect communities, ecosystems, and economies, we need integrated, equitable, and sustainable strategies that pair nature-based and technological solutions with early-warning systems and proactive risk planning; every dollar spent on prevention can save many more in recovery, while resilient coastal ecosystems could sequester or avoid up to 1 Gt CO₂e annually by 2050.
Vision
We envision working with coastal communities to increase resilience—through a combined approach that safeguards coastlines while restoring biodiversity, protecting areas of long-term carbon sequestration, and stimulating economic growth for the region. By co-developing opportunities to mitigate climate impacts while inventing climate-positive strategies to advance blue economies, communities can lead a new generation of regenerative, adaptive projects that reduce the impacts of climate hazards. Through deepening our understanding of coastal systems, we can create evidence-based policies, finance, and technologies and scale climate solutions that mitigate and adapt. By conserving and restoring coastal ecosystems, we can build coastlines that thrive and protect people from future disasters.
Example Areas for Innovation
- Creating new blue bioeconomy systems to transform coastal ecosystems that shift production from land to sea and enable coastal communities to prosper.
- Developing sustainable aquaculture systems to generate feedstock, maximize food production, create high-value materials, and promote healthy ecosystems.
- Sensing and restoring blue carbon ecosystems to enable blue carbon conversion.
- Creating measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification (MMRV) systems for coastal carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and carbon markets.
- Developing novel, distributed, and/or low-cost sensors for scaling accessible coastal monitoring for managing extreme weather and climate risks.
- Advancing disaster resilience through extreme weather and climate information systems.
- Designing nature-based coastal hybrid infrastructure to provide adaptive, cost-effective protection while reinforcing rich, biodiverse carbon storage environments.
- Innovating financing mechanisms for community climate resilience.
- Empowering community-driven leadership and action, to ensure that coastal adaptation and mitigation strategies are locally relevant, just, and enduring.