The post ” Five Years Into North Carolina’s Coastal Resilience Plan, The Hardest Work May Be Just Beginning first appeared on Crafting Your Home.
North Carolina has spent five years helping coastal communities understand their risks, develop resilience strategies, and move priority projects toward construction. The numbers show significant progress, but the state’s own independent evaluation reveals a more complicated question: How much of that planning has actually changed what happens on the ground?
For a state with 20 coastal counties, preparing for flooding, storms, sea-level rise, and other coastal hazards is not simply a matter of drawing up another plan. It requires local governments to identify vulnerable neighborhoods and infrastructure, find money, navigate permitting, and eventually turn plans into projects.
Five years into North Carolina’s Resilient Coastal Communities Program (RCCP), that process is moving forward. But the record also shows that planning, funding, and actual implementation are not the same thing.
As of September 2026, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal Management said the program had helped 60 communities complete resilience strategies and awarded 91 grants totaling $16.3 million.
Those figures represent a substantial expansion of the state’s coastal resilience effort. They also provide a useful starting point for asking what has changed and what remains unfinished.
From Risk Assessments To Projects
The RCCP was designed around four stages.
The first two focus on community engagement, risk and vulnerability assessments, planning, project selection,n and prioritization. The third moves into engineering and design. The fourth is intended for actual project implementation.
That structure matters.
A community completing a resilience strategy has identified vulnerabilities and prioritized projects. It has not necessarily completed those projects.
North Carolina’s own program documentation makes the distinction clear. Phase 3 supports feasibility studies, engineering, design, and permitting, while Phase 4 funds construction and implementation.
Nevertheless, the program has moved beyond planning in several communities.
As of autumn 2025, the state reported awarding approximately $8.13 million in Phase 3 engineering and design funding and about $4.36 million for Phase 4 implementation. Projects have included wetland restoration, living shorelines, stormwater improvements, and flood-mitigation efforts.
That represents a meaningful shift from simply identifying coastal problems toward designing and building responses.
The Numbers Have Grown
The program’s scale has increased considerably since its early rounds.
In July 2025, DEQ reported that the RCCP had awarded approximately $16 million through 108 grants to 56 coastal communities. The grants covered planning, engineering, design, construction, and implementation.
By September 2026, DEQ’s updated figure was 91 grants totaling $16.3 million to 60 communities.
Because the two announcements describe different points in the program’s development and use different grant-count figures, they should not be treated as independent confirmation of the same statistic. The September 2026 figure is the more recent state figure.
The continuing availability of funding also shows that the program is not finished. DEQ opened another round in September 2026, making about $2.5 million available for Phase 3 and Phase 4 projects.
But Planning Has Not Automatically Become Policy
This is where the story becomes more complicated.
An independent evaluation conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that the program has helped communities better understand coastal risks and improve their capacity to pursue resilience projects.
But the evaluation also found that formal changes to local policies and plans remained limited during the period studied. Communities reported using resilience strategies informally in planning and decision-making, while researchers found some of the clearest examples of formal policy integration were still emerging.
One notable example came in Beaufort, where RCCP funding in 2024 supported efforts to incorporate resilience into the town’s unified development ordinance.
In 2025, North Carolina also began a pilot program allowing participating communities to use RCCP results to update their CAMA Land Use Plans with a stronger resilience focus.
That could matter because land-use plans shape how communities approach growth, development, and natural-resource management.
But it is still an emerging process, not evidence that resilience has already been fully integrated across North Carolina’s coast.
Smaller Communities Face A Bigger Challenge
One of the clearest findings from the independent evaluation concerns small towns.
Communities with fewer than 1,000 residents have been underrepresented in the program, and researchers point to limited staff capacity as a key barrier.
That creates a practical problem.
The communities facing coastal hazards do not all have the same administrative resources. A larger local government may have staff available to manage grant applications, engineering contracts, and permitting. A small coastal town may have far fewer people handling those responsibilities.
As a result, having a resilience strategy on paper does not necessarily mean a community has the personnel or financial capacity to move quickly toward construction.
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The Implementation Gap Matters
The distinction between planning and implementation may be the program’s most important lesson from its first five years.
The state’s current program continues to separate the process into four phases precisely because identifying a problem is only the beginning. A project must still be designed, engineered, permitted, and funded before construction can occur.
The UNC evaluation also examined whether RCCP participation translated into greater local investment in coastal resilience. Researchers compared four participating communities with four similar communities that had not participated.
The evaluation found no consistent increase in local coastal-resilience expenditures attributable to RCCP participation during the period examined.
That does not erase the program’s accomplishments. It puts them in context.
The evidence supports saying that North Carolina has expanded resilience planning, improved local capacity, and created a pipeline of projects.
It does not support saying that the program has eliminated flooding, made every coastal community resilient, or demonstrated a statewide reduction in storm damage.
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Five Years Later, The Question Is What Comes Next
North Carolina’s coastal-resilience effort has clearly evolved.
More communities are participating, more resilience strategies are being developed, more engineering and design work is underway, and more projects are moving into implementation. The state is also experimenting with incorporating resilience into broader land-use planning.
But the unfinished part of the story may be just as important.
Can small communities overcome staffing and financial barriers? Will resilience strategies become binding or routinely used components of local planning? And can the projects identified through years of assessments ultimately be built and maintained?
Five years of planning have produced a larger pipeline of ideas, designs,s and projects.
The next measure of progress is harder to count: whether those plans withstand construction, local budgets, and the next major coastal storm.
That is where North Carolina’s resilience experiment enters its most consequential phase.
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