There’s no big wall planned to protect North Carolina’s coast from storm surge. There’s no massive tunnel system proposed to keep floodwaters away from populated areas. There are no grant-funded resilience competitions to help the state plan to manage water more effectively.
There are, though, dozens of smaller efforts to tackle the big problem of climate change and more extreme weather events. Informed by flooding from Hurricane Floyd in 1999, Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and multiple events in between, communities from North Carolina’s coast to its mountains are doing what they can to prevent flooding and protect people.