Economic Benefits of NOAA Resilience Grants

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coastal Resilience Grants program funds projects that help save lives, protect property, reduce infrastructure damage, and benefit ecosystems and the economy. To help justify funding for future projects, NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management needed to demonstrate the value of these grants. However, this was challenging because the project benefits were diverse; some benefits were only realized after many years; and some benefits could be partially attributed to actions unrelated to the grants. NOAA contracted with ERG to develop a solution for estimating the benefits of existing and future grants.

ERG assembled a team of economists, communications specialists, and coastal management specialists to identify, describe, and quantify the benefits of the existing grants and use that information to develop an overall methodology for estimating the benefits of coastal resilience grants. Our team began by reviewing the information in NOAA’s resilience grants database and interviewing grantees. They used this information to identify the universe of benefits across different grant types and select a subset of five grants that represented that universe, including benefits such as capacity building, damage reduction, sustaining home value, and insurance-related savings. Our team then developed value chains to clearly and transparently document how each benefit was generated. Based on this work, our economists developed guides describing a methodology that NOAA could use to estimate the benefits from existing and future grants. NOAA then applied this methodology to help tell a compelling story of how investment in coastal resilience grants justifies future funding.