Where Restoration Meets Resilience: New York State REDI Program Rethinks Coastal Protection

Historically, shoreline protection favored hardened, structural solutions designed to stabilize shorelines and protect assets. While often effective at resisting erosion, these methods can restrict natural sediment movement, reduce habitat value, limit public access, and alter the character of the waterfront.

Today’s shoreline challenges are defined more by variability. Water levels fluctuate more dramatically. Storm events arrive with greater intensity. Ice, waves, and seasonal shifts place competing demands on infrastructure, habitat, and public access, particularly in freshwater coastal systems. In response, a more integrated approach—one that treats restoration and resilience as complementary objectives rather than separate efforts—is gaining traction.

At the center of this shift is the pairing of advanced coastal modeling with nature-based solutions.

Restoration-Driven Resilience in the Great Lakes
The value of this integrated approach is especially evident in the Great Lakes, where shoreline systems are shaped by highly variable water levels, strong wave energy, and seasonal ice. These conditions place unique demands on shoreline protection and make rigid, 1D solutions difficult to sustain.

In response, New York State’s Resiliency and Economic Development Initiative (REDI) provides a framework for communities along Lake Ontario to rethink how shoreline resilience is achieved. Across multiple sites, projects combine site-specific coastal modeling with living shoreline and hybrid features to reduce erosion, protect public and private assets, and restore nearshore habitat.

While the individual sites and design solutions vary, the broader lesson is consistent: resilience is strongest when restoration and protection are designed together, informed by local conditions, ecosystems, emphasis on natural processes and long-term system behavior.

Designing for Variability, Not Averages
Traditional shoreline designs often rely on conservative assumptions intended to cover worst-case scenarios. While this can provide protection, it can also lead to overbuilt structures that limit ecological function, public access, and long-term adaptability.

In settings such as those found along the Great Lakes coasts, modern wind, wave, and hydrodynamic modeling allow teams to move beyond averages and educated guesses. By evaluating how shorelines respond across a range of water levels, wave climates, and seasonal conditions, designers can better understand where protection is truly needed and where flexible, less-rigid solutions offer a variety of positive project outcomes.

This modeling-driven approach creates space for hybrid designs tailored to each site to balance performance with ecological function.

Nature-Based Solutions as Infrastructure
Living shorelines, offshore reefs, cobble and gravel barriers, and vegetated systems are often associated with habitat restoration. Increasingly, they are also being recognized as viable coastal infrastructure assets.

When designed using site-specific modeling and sediment transport analysis, nature-based features can mimic natural processes and attenuate wave energy, reduce erosion, and protect critical assets. At the same time, they can enhance ecosystem function and create recreational and educational opportunities along the shoreline.

Rather than replacing gray infrastructure outright, these features often work alongside it, softening impacts while extending the life and performance of engineered systems.

Along Lake Ontario, REDI projects demonstrate how living shorelines, offshore features, and hybrid systems can function as both protection and restoration infrastructure. By pairing these features with site-specific modeling, Great Lakes communities are addressing erosion and shoreline stability while preserving nearshore habitat and recreational use.

Balancing Protection, Habitat, and Community Use
Resilient shorelines must serve multiple audiences. Property owners need confidence that investments are protected. Communities want access to waterfronts. Natural systems call for space and time to function.

Integrating restoration into resilience planning helps reconcile these needs. By considering navigation, recreation, private property, and ecological conditions together, shoreline designs can reduce conflict and deliver broader public value.

Stakeholder engagement is part of the design process, not an afterthought. Input from residents who have spent decades living along these shorelines often provides valuable insight into local conditions, seasonal patterns, and past changes that may not be captured in data alone. Incorporating this lived experience into project planning helps refine designs and build broader support for adaptive solutions.

Beneficial Use and the Circular Shoreline Economy
Another emerging dimension of resilient shoreline design in the Great Lakes region is the beneficial use of material, particularly sediment generated through dredging and navigation maintenance.

Rather than treating dredged material as waste, many project teams now recognize it as a valuable resource and integrate it into project designs to support shoreline restoration, barrier systems, or nearshore habitat. This approach keeps sediment within natural systems, reduces disposal challenges, and aligns resilience investments with broader environmental goals.

It also reflects a growing recognition that resilience is as much about resource management as it is about structural design and ideally done on a system-wide scale.

Under the REDI program, the restoration of barrier systems at Blind Sodus Bay demonstrates how dredged sediment can be used to support shoreline restoration. The beneficial use of dredged material improved resilience and kept sediment within the natural system while reducing the need for off-site disposal.

The Future of Restoration-Driven Resilience
While every shoreline is different, the principles behind restoration-driven resilience are broadly transferable. Understand the system. Model the conditions. Work with natural processes where possible. Harden only where absolutely necessary.

As funding and planning programs place greater emphasis on risk reduction, environmental performance, and long-term community value, an integrated approach such as the one used in the REDI program offers a practical path forward. It acknowledges uncertainty while building shorelines that can evolve over time.

Resilience, in this context, is not about resisting change. It is about designing shorelines that can accommodate it while restoring the systems that make coastal communities livable.