How Fernleaf’s Game-Changing Tool Is Uncovering the Hidden Impact of Flooding on Vulnerable Communities

As Hampton Roads endures more frequent and increasingly severe flooding events, vulnerable places – and people – are becoming more evident. To address this, Fernleaf, a climate resilience planning firm founded in 2014 and based in Asheville, North Carolina, is helping the region’s transportation planning organization understand how hazardous conditions affect a community’s ability to access the places they need to go and how they get there.

As a 2022 RISE Urban Coastal Community Resilience Challenge winner, Fernleaf is using its in-house developed software called AccelAdapt to help the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization assess flooding and its impact on roadways and transit in the region’s most vulnerable communities.

Much of the company’s work has been in the Southeast, according to Fernleaf’s CEO Matt Hutchins. Now, the firm is building upon its previous work in other localities.

Matt Hutchins

“We take a community profile approach for looking at all people, all places, but we haven’t drilled very deep into transportation sector analysis before,” Hutchins says. “This RISE initiative is allowing us to plug in and expand a little more broadly, but also more deeply.”

The project covers all of Hampton Roads, but started with a pilot project focused on the City of Portsmouth, which has both vulnerable populations and climate-related issues based on its geographic location. It was a proof of concept that established a baseline by which the entire region could be evaluated using the same methodology.

Decoding vulnerability: using data to unravel the stressors impacting communities

Hutchins describes Fernleaf’s approach as one intended to provide its clients with the necessary data to develop their own path toward resiliency, not to determine a specific course of action. “Our mission is ultimately to inform decision makers so that they can take that information and make sound, climate-related resilience decisions,” he says.

“We kind of take a foundational approach of doing assessments and supporting implementation and strategy development,” Hutchins says. “We look at trusted sources of information and how to use that in a framework for decision making.”

Those sources include federal and state agencies and partners. Guidance from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration informs Fernleaf’s scenario-based approach when considering future climate conditions. Other trusted sources are local governments – building codes, local property uses and ordinances – as well as the communities themselves through public input.

According to Hutchins, climate and hazard information fall into one of two data buckets. This first includes information that reflects stressors impacting a community, for example heavy precipitation events, their frequency and intensity, and the hazards people in the community face as a result, such as inland flooding.

South Norfolk, Chesapeake, VA. Photo by Carol Ann Benson (WTKR)

The second bucket looks at who – and what – are impacted because of these hazards. “The bulk of our work gets into understanding the different nuances of what makes people and places more or less vulnerable … and having an understanding of the drivers of that vulnerability so that we can target that in an informed way,” Hutchins says.

Core services, core impact: prioritizing resilience for essential resources

For the RISE-funded project, Fernleaf has been hyper-focused on core services: hospitals, grocery stores, schools and resources that people in the community rely on – and how increasing hazards or climate stressor events affect access to those services, with the understanding that underserved and lower-income communities are more greatly affected than others when access to those core services is interrupted, Hutchins says.

Dale Stith is the principal transportation planner for HRTPO. She oversees long-range transportation planning for the organization, evaluating possible scenarios that could impact the region 20 to 30 years down the road. Resiliency and equity are key factors in those predictions.

“This Fernleaf tool plays nicely into my ability to do all these what if scenarios,” she says. “I can do them quickly and then really highlight those most resilient projects that do well across many potential futures for the region.”

It’s those projects that “we want to invest our limited transportation dollars in,” she adds.

The data is out there, Stith says, but not always in a readily accessible format and compiling it can be laborious and time consuming. She and her team can do their jobs more efficiently because Fernleaf has taken care of the grunt work, she says. It’s not only a better use of their time but also taxpayer dollars, she adds.

Fernleaf’s focus on core services – and people’s ability to access them – “is one thing that they’re doing that I absolutely love,” Stith says. The matrix the firm has developed highlights critical infrastructure then layers on vulnerable areas and populations where flooding will become more intense, enabling her team to evaluate access to essential services on a scale from high to low.

“Having a tool that not only looks at these separately but together really helps us tell the story of where our critical – not just our critical infrastructure, but our critical populations – are, and the relationship between the two.”

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