Latest News

Hampton Roads has always lived with water. The tides shape our economy, our culture and our very identity. Yet today, that same water defines one of our greatest challenges — rising seas, sinking land and the growing pressure of climate change affecting every shoreline community. But this region is on the cusp of something extraordinary.

Buchanan County, which has had three major floods in recent years, and Botetourt County, which has dealt with flash flooding, were chosen for the projects.

Flooding and rainwater have been a consistent thorn in the side of the Botetourt County Fire and EMS. Now, they have a new device to combat the floods with their new ultrasonic river sensors.

RISE Resilience Innovations, a Virginia-based nonprofit dedicated to addressing threats facing flood-prone communities, is excited to announce the four winning teams of its 2025 Riverine Community Resilience Challenge II.

Devices found on various bridges throughout Botetourt County that measure the impact of flood zones were recently installed, say Botetourt County Fire and EMS department officials on social media. The county is working together with Floodmapp and GreenStream Technologies to measure how much flooding will impact low‐lying and flood‐prone areas, especially around creeks and river beds.

Building on the success of last year’s Riverine Community Resilience Challenge in Southwest Virginia, RISE Resilience Innovations is expanding its efforts into Northwest Virginia and the Roanoke Valley regions to strengthen disaster preparedness and flood resilience for thousands of vulnerable Virginians.

Virginia-based nonprofit RISE Resilience Solutions recently issued over $1.2 million in funding to go towards reducing flooding in southwest Virginia. The funding will be split up between the five winners of RISE’s Riverine Community Resilience Challenge, where innovators were asked to develop new insurance products and early-warning systems to protect communities in the region susceptible to flooding.

Nonprofits LISC Hampton Roads and RISE seek solutions to chronic problems in underserved communities

Two parametric insurance initiatives have been awarded grants from Virginia’s Department of Housing and Community Development to strengthen flood resilience in the southwest of the state.

The Climate Resilient Infrastructure Report series was first launched in May 2023 in an effort to report progress on the state of climate-resilient infrastructure and showcase best-practice case studies and initiatives from around the world. With over 50 contributions, the report highlights case studies that elevate the agenda for resilience and adaptation across all infrastructure sectors and showcase best-practice examples of technology applications that build resilience and sustainability. RISE Challenge Winner, Floodmapp is featured on page 84 for their innovative solution involving Live Flood Intelligence for Real Time Traffic Routing.

In this episode, we’re going to drop in on communities on each of America’s three coasts, each coming up with their own set of solutions to the water that is slowly consuming their edges.

In an effort to strengthen flood resilience in Southwest Virginia, RISE, a Virginia-based nonprofit focused on climate adaptation, has awarded $1.2 million in funding to five winners of the Riverine Community Resilience Challenge.

Described as a “cutting-edge testing ground for new resilience products and technologies,” the site contains oyster substrate made by Natrx from dredge materials, an innovative septic system by Triangle Environmental, nature-based shoreline stabilization products by several different entities, and marsh plant production by the nonprofit Knott Alone/Hold Fast.

On Monday August 12, 2024, a major initiative launched in Gloucester aimed at highlighting some of the pressures coastal communities face with flooding and sea level rise.

In Gloucester County, the Coastal Resilience and Adaptation Ecosystem will serve as a real-world testing ground for new products and technology to combat those threats. The $6 million project was started with $2.9 million from Go Virginia.

Natrx tested and validated converting the clays from dredging in the York River into a substitute for some of the cement in concrete, lowering its carbon footprint by nearly half and the cost by nearly two-thirds. Not only is it cheaper, but it is also stronger than traditional concrete.

An innovative new method of treating and reusing wastewater now being tested at the Middle Peninsula Chesapeake Bay Public Access Authority’s Captain Sinclair facility on the Severn River in Gloucester could provide a cost-effective alternative to failing septic systems.

Abby Johnson, Executive Director and founder of VPA and President and Founder of Abacus Property Solutions has been included in the 2024 Hampton Roads Business Journal’s Power List for her work implementing and spreading C-Pace financing in the area and beyond.

The Middle Peninsula is often called the septic repair capital of the East Coast. Failing systems can flood yards with sewage, threatening the health of people and the environment.

Mayor Michelle Wu today announced that the City of Boston has awarded the City of Boston Flood Modeling RFP to FloodMapp to provide real-time flood monitoring to enhance emergency preparation, response, and recovery during flood events, marking a significant step forward in the city’s resilience, an important part of the Mayor’s Green New Deal.

Winners will receive funding and support to pilot solutions in greater Hampton Roads, Va.

Nonprofit’s new “Riverine Community Resilience Challenge” offers entrepreneurs $1 million for innovative flood warning, building and landscape, community insurance solutions

Virginia nonprofit finds, funds and accelerates most promising solutions to flooding and other climate-related challenges

The waterways and shorelines that make up Hampton Roads harbor a historic reputation as ideal hosts for commerce, trade, shipbuilding, military installations and government research.

We know the past and present, but what about the future of Hampton Roads? We asked several regional leaders to give us their view for what the future has in store for the area 20 years from now.

Community Resilience Challenge Design Workshop (CDW) explores far-reaching topics and sets the stage for an upcoming innovation challenge.

Norfolk is among several local cities partnering with Waze to send flooding alerts to drivers. As 10 On Your Side has reported, sensors placed on 20 select roadways will send an alert to users, if the sensor detects at least two inches of water. The app is available in both the Apple Store and the Google Play Store. Once you’ve downloaded the app, go into your settings to select these alerts. The app will even help redirect you around the flooded areas.

Chesapeake Bay Foundation volunteers installed over 100 bags of oyster shells on Friday along a living shoreline in Portsmouth.

The shells will attract new oysters, which will then develop a reef in the area. Once the reef is formed, it will help break up waves and prevent erosion to the shoreline.

The volunteers bagged recycled shells from local restaurants in the Hampton Roads area to use in the project. The foundation is part of the Chesapeake Oyster Alliance, which looks for methods to improve oyster sectors.

RISE today announced five winning small businesses in its $1.5 million Flood Insurance of the Future Challenge, a competition designed to source innovative solutions that reduce flood-related insurance premiums and payouts by 50%.

Each winner will receive up to $300,000 in funding to test and advance next-generation products in Hampton Roads, Virginia, until the end of 2023. Winners also get access to other resources in the RISE Innovation Hub and Testbed, such as a customized business accelerator through 757 Collab, co-working office and testing space, real-world pilot sites and introductions to regional municipalities and stakeholders.

The goal of the recent challenge, called Flood Insurance of the Future, is to cut insurance premiums and payouts in half, working with private insurers as well as the NFIP.

“There’s a gap in flood insurance,” RISE executive director Paul Robinson told WHRO last year. “The flood insurance programs that are generally available are not funded well enough to fully recover those homeowners or those property owners that are badly affected by flood.”

RISE has announced five winners of the challenge who will now pilot their solutions in Hampton Roads, which has the highest rate of sea level rise on the East Coast.

Karen Speights’ flood insurance bill for her home in Norfolk’s Chesterfield Heights has risen almost every year in the last decade.

“That’s been a burden,” 64-year-old Speights said.

It’s why she signed onto a pilot project with a local startup to see what might reduce her home’s flooding risk. It’s been going on for more than a year while she lives elsewhere.

It was worth it, she said, so she could see big drops to her flood insurance premium.

Norfolk nonprofit RISE Resilience Innovations dedicated its most recent funding challenge to working with the industry and cutting total premiums and payouts in half.

Coastal Virginia is emerging as a living laboratory for innovators interested in testing, validating, and demonstrating solutions to the growing problem of flooding.

Since 2018, the nonprofit RISE has deployed over $6 million to 35 companies through “Challenges” that bring coastal resilience entrepreneurs together to solve many of the problems urban and coastal communities are facing.

Hampton Roads has one of the highest rates of sea level rise and flooding risk on the East Coast.

One tool residents can use to protect themselves financially is through buying flood insurance. But there are many problems with the current system.

Norfolk’s RISE Resilience Innovations is hoping to help address them. The nonprofit gives out money to small groups to try out environmental solutions — using Hampton Roads as a testing ground.

Whenever historic homes get flooded, building contractors often feel compelled by government regulations to rip out the water-logged wood flooring, tear down the old plaster walls and install new, flood-resistant materials. But restorers Paige Pollard and Kerry Shackelford say they know something that science is yet to prove: historic building materials can often withstand repeated soakings.

Pollard and Shackelford’s joint venture in Virginia, the retrofit design firm Building Resilient Solutions, opened a lab this year in which planks of old-growth pine, oak and cedar are submerged into a tank mimicking flood conditions.

Traffic and high water mapping technology out of Australia showed enough promise helping Norfolk navigate its flooding woes during a 9-month pilot project that the city has decided to expand and continue its use, just in time for hurricane season.

Building Resilient Solutions Building is using their RISE grant to develop best flood resilience practices for historic buildings.

RISE Challenge winners could receive up to $300,000 each.

Eight businesses will each receive up to $300,000 in funding and support to pilot solutions addressing sea level rise and flooding in coastal Virginia.

FEMA has paid millions of dollars to raise more than 120 homes across Hampton Roads in the last decade, but industry expert John Sargent believes that’s not nearly enough to keep our region afloat.

That’s why Sargent brought the Home Raising Academy to Hampton Roads. The Home Raising Academy was funded by a $250,000 RISE resiliency grant.

As climate change intensifies, septic failures are emerging as a vexing issue for local governments.

Lewie Lawrence, executive director of the Middle Peninsula Planning District, is looking for solutions, partnering with RISE, a Norfolk-based technology innovations accelerator, in a challenge to design septic systems that can be elevated much like HVAC systems.

As sea levels continue to rise in coastal communities, so does the demand for innovative solutions that will help residents adapt.

Leaders in coastal regions like Hampton Roads are battling a flood of resiliency problems, but in the face of the storm there’s a group in Norfolk working to show the community that there’s a silver lining.

Sea-level rise on Virginia’s coast means that an afternoon rainstorm can strand hundreds of drivers on flooded streets. A traffic app now warns drivers of swamped roads in real time, illustrating how one city is trying to adapt to climate change.

Waze, a navigation app owned by Google, has partnered with Norfolk, Va., to pilot an app that will allow drivers to get real-time information about flooded roads. The alert system was set up Monday.

Waze is piloting the program with Norfolk. The forecasting technology comes from FloodMapp, a climate tech company funded by RISE Resilience Innovations, the Norfolk-based nonprofit that doles out money and resources to find solutions to environmental challenges.

Do you ever wish your GPS could tell you where there’s flooding and which roads to avoid? Well, there’s now an app for that.

It’s thanks to a partnership between the local nonprofit RISE, the GPS app Waze, the City of Norfolk and the company FloodMapp.

A new app feature through Waze tracks flooded roads and Norfolk drivers were the first to use it.

FloodMapp, the winner of the RISE Urban Mobility Resilience Challenge, will integrate its forecast flooding technology with Waze to offer drivers alerts about flooded roads.

Norfolk drivers have become attuned to the street-by-street nuances of navigating flooding. Now they’ll be the first to test a more precise way to maneuver around floodwaters, based not on local smarts but real-time data.

Funded as the winner of the RISE Urban Mobility Resilience Challenge, FloodMapp’s innovative solution allows Waze to offer drivers real-time, street-level alerts of flooded roads. FloodMapp is piloting the program in Norfolk, Virginia, where Waze users will be the first to test the new feature.

In 2017, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded Norfolk $120 million to better protect its communities against natural disasters. Norfolk has used most of that money for infrastructure enhancements: building berms, raising walls and laying stormwater pipes. But the city also set aside about $5 million for RISE, a nonprofit that helps businesses grow as they create solutions to help address climate change.

Monday morning, a small group of students filed one by one to the front of a classroom filled with plants. It is mid-December, but a graduation was taking place next to the greenhouse at Churchland High School.

Representing industries ranging from retail and fitness to tech and biosciences, these creative, visionary trendsetters and entrepreneurs keep the Old Dominion new and relevant.

Winning businesses will receive funding and support to pilot innovative solutions addressing sea level rise and flooding in rural and urban coastal Virginia.

Tech can help cities and homeowners understand their flood risk.

A climate tech accelerator in Virginia is working with cities to prepare for future floods.

With their storm-water systems increasingly vulnerable to climate change, cities across the country are testing new technology to better monitor water flows.

Six small business will receive funding, support and access to the RISE testbed in Hampton Roads to pilot and commercialize next-generation solutions to flooding and sea level rise.

A $2.9 million grant was recently awarded to the Coastal Resilience and Adaptation Economy initiative that will foster innovation and growth in Virginia’s water economy. The project will launch a resilience entrepreneurship competition and establish a business-focused network to engage businesses and facilitate resilient practices.

The Hampton Roads Workforce Council has been selected as one of six agencies in the country to take part in an effort to develop innovative ways to rapidly retrain and refocus more than 25,000 displaced workers into higher paying jobs.

In Hampton Roads, rising tides have started to turn some of the region’s stormwater systems — which are meant to usher rainwater into ponds, lakes and rivers via underground pipes — against this coastal community.

Technology startup will receive funding, business mentorship, and access to a testbed in Hampton Roads to pilot and commercialize a next generation real-time flood prediction system to reroute drivers around flooded roads.

The very idea sounds backwards — usually frequent flooding from bigger and more destructive storms is costly. One study showed a direct hit could have cost the region $5 billion of its gross domestic product in just three months. But some are looking at the rising seas and sensing opportunity.

RISE announced the launch of six RISE Coastal Community Resilience Challenges. These Challenges will award a total of $2 million to small businesses with innovative resilience solutions that create substantial new value, can be demonstrated in the Hampton Roads region of Southeastern Virginia, and can be built into sustainable businesses.

The six small business winners will each receive between $160,000 and $310,000 to build innovative products, services and workforce development programs to help coastal communities adapt to climate change.

His system would harness power that otherwise would have been lost from cars braking and turn it into cheap, emission-free electricity.

Adapting to climate change will require new approaches at the local level. On the Chesapeake Bay, entrepreneurs are being incentivized to find the answers.

Rising sea levels are a massive threat to Hampton Roads and its economy. How can local governments tackle such a huge problem? By betting on the little guys. That’s the logic behind the nonprofit RISE, which will fund small businesses that are working on solutions to flooding and other problems caused by climate change and sinking land.

A local non-profit is challenging teams and entrepreneurs to come up with ways to solve sea level rise. Rise is a non-profit organization that focuses on solving resilience problems in coastal communities, including sea level rise, recurrent flooding and economic resilience.

The workshop has attracted more than 50 participants, including the Chief Resilience Officers from several of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative, international experts and regional representatives from local government, military, ports, non-profit and academic sectors.

RISE today announced five winners of the 2020 RISE Coastal Community Resilience Challenges. The winners are small businesses that will each receive up to $250,000 to advance and demonstrate cutting-edge products that help coastal communities adapt to the impacts of sea level rise and flooding. RISE will work with the five teams to pilot their approaches in a “living laboratory” environment across the Hampton Roads region in coastal Virginia, with the goal of building economically viable businesses and solutions that are scalable to other communities.

RISE announced the launch of six RISE Coastal Community Resilience Challenges. These Challenges will award a total of $2 million to small businesses with innovative resilience solutions that create substantial new value, can be demonstrated in the Hampton Roads region of Southeastern Virginia, and can be built into sustainable businesses.

The six small business winners will each receive between $160,000 and $310,000 to build innovative products, services and workforce development programs to help coastal communities adapt to climate change.

His system would harness power that otherwise would have been lost from cars braking and turn it into cheap, emission-free electricity.