Connecting Coastal Restoration, Flood Risk, and Insurance in Dauphin Island, Alabama: A Community Resilience Center Pilot

The Approach

The Graveline Bay Insurance Pilot demonstrates how the Community Resilience Center’s work across coastal restoration, flood risk, community engagement, and insurance can come together to address an interconnected challenge facing Gulf Coast communities.

This innovative project was supported by the Gulf of America Alliance through funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office for Coastal Management. The CRC worked with engineering partner Moffatt & Nichol and reinsurance partner Munich Reinsurance America, Inc. (Munich Re US) to understand the potential impacts of a marsh restoration project on the flood insurance policies of adjacent properties.

The restoration project, completed in 2023, added approximately 60 acres of marsh to Graveline Bay on Dauphin Island. While the goal of the project was to restore marsh habitat, the risk reduction benefits were able to be modeled and quantified.

We learned that the marsh is working. Modeling completed by Moffatt & Nichol found that the marsh reduced wave heights and water levels across a range of storms. Munich Re US estimated that those changes reduced average annual loss for nearby properties by 9% to 18%. While that does not guarantee an equivalent decrease in premiums, it shows that the properties are less risky to insure.

We communicated these results to the residents living next to the restored marsh, while investigating how these results could be incorporated into the National Flood Insurance Program’s pricing system, called Risk Rating 2.0. By working with actuaries, insurance companies, reinsurance companies, insurance advocates, researchers, catastrophe modelers, and other stakeholders, we were able to identify some promising policy pathways for incorporating locally developed risk information into Risk Rating 2.0.

For more information, please read our briefing to Friends of the Community Resilience Center, available below.

For more about what we’ve learned through the Insurance Focus Area, please visit the focus area page: https://thewaterinstitute.org/crc/insurance-affordability-and-availability-focus-area