Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation

Coastal floods are among the costliest natural disasters in the U.S., comprising nearly one-third of all billion-dollar disasters in the past decade, according to the National Climatic Data Center. Hazard mitigation policy at the federal, state, and local level has historically focused investment in construction of hardened, or gray, infrastructure for shoreline protection. New legislation, such as Maryland’s 2008 Living Shoreline Protection Act, shows a shift towards investment in natural infrastructure (NI), which provides the same types of services as man-made infrastructure while also providing additional benefits to people and ecosystems. Applying tools from behavioral economics, cognitive science, and psychology, this research aims to understand how people make decisions to invest in natural infrastructure for coastal risk, reduction, and resilience. We analyzed local and state policies of three coastal NI projects to understand the general decision context. Using established methods from social science and marketing research, we conducted in=depth interviews with decision makers, stakeholders, and experts involved with NI cases to reach a grounded theory about the influence of behavioral and institutional factors (e.g. heuristics, peer-influence, diffusion of innovation)  in infrastructure investment decisions. We found that decision makers who are innovators that act as local champions are influenced by social networks to invest in NI.