City of Pensacola Receives Grant Award for Resilient Coastlines Program

The City of Pensacola has been selected to receive a $75,000 grant award from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for the city's Resilient Coastlines Program. Through the program, the City of Pensacola and regional partners are pursuing an aggressive and overarching climate planning objective to address underlying climate change threats. 

This grant scope of work advances four key tasks that include:

• Identifying coastal risk from sea level rise.
• Linking coastal risk to FEMA’s Community Rating System program.
• Developing a technical basis to plan for future sea level rise (with mitigation adaptation strategies).
• Communicating future sea level rise risks to the public.

Downtown Pensacola and areas to the southwest of Bayou Grande have some of the greatest vulnerability to changes in flooding due to increasing sea levels. The project will provide a critical step in the city’s vulnerability planning process to move from conceptual to actual data and recommendations for integration into policy structures and decision-making processes.

The anticipated timeline for this project is August 2020 through June 2021, with several deliverable goal dates throughout the project. The City of Pensacola will provide updates to the public as the Resilient Coastlines Program moves forward.  

This grant was applied for through the efforts of City of Pensacola Assistant Planning Director Cynthia Cannon and City Administrator Keith Wilkins.
 
“I am incredibly proud of city staff for pursuing and receiving this state grant for such an important project,” Mayor Grover Robinson said. “The Resilient Coastlines Program will not only benefit the City of Pensacola, but the surrounding environment that extends beyond city limits. I’d like to thank the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for selecting Pensacola as a grant recipient, which will provide us additional opportunities to work toward protecting our coastlines for future generations.”
 
To learn more about FDEP’s Florida Resilient Coastlines Program or view a complete list of grant recipients, visit floridadep.gov.