Florida shows how to adapt as coastal cities face growing threats from sea level rise and storms

Florida communities are turning to innovative design and infrastructure to better withstand rising seas and other climate threats. Workers install a 3D-printed living seawall manufactured by Kind Designs at the Church by the Sea, Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky) One day there was a roof. The next morning it was gone. Jeffrey Huber still remembers the day some 34 years ago when Hurricane Andrew blew off the roof of his childhood home, one of tens of thousands damaged and destroyed across southern Florida. For days, first responders couldn’t get to them. For a month and a half, they relied on food donations. For more than a year, he lived with his family in a trailer. “It wasn’t just about the storm itself, but it was about the aftermath of that storm and how we begin to design for those aspects,” said Huber, a landscape architect and professor who was 12 in 1992 when the Category 5 hurricane hit. “We are seeing extreme storms, extreme scenarios like this that are becoming much more common.” Some 129 million people — nearly 40% of the U.S. population — live in coastal counties. Recent research shows that a rise in sea level driven by humans has increased the frequency of extreme coastal flooding around the world. As climate change threatens communities, Florida is showing how to build to adapt. Throughout the state, architects and designers are merging infrastructure with urban design to create residential buildings, parks and more. The goal is to better withstand rising waters, worsening storms, saltwater intrusion, heat heaves and other climate impacts. “In places like Miami, we’re dealing with a combination of tidal flooding, storm surge and long-term sea level rise," said Huber, professor in the School of Architecture at Florida Atlantic University. “So the question isn’t about how we stop water, but it’s how we live on, with and over it.” As global average temperatures climb because of fossil fuel emissions, so do sea levels, making low-lying coastal cities vulnerable to flooding. Frequent flooding and intensifying storm surges got so bad in Miami Beach that when it rained, Anya Freeman rushed home to move her car because her street filled with knee-deep water and she couldn’t get car insurance for flooding. “But nobody was doing anything practical about it,” she said. So in 2024, she left behind her career as a lawyer to launch Kind Designs, a startup creating 3D-printed living seawalls to protect shorelines from flooding. These seawalls are meant to be affordable so they can be scaled, and also serve as marine habitat. They’re made faster and with a nontoxic concrete mixture and can be custom shaped for the ecosystems where they’re installed. On a recent August day, workers in neon-green shirts and yellow construction hats installed one mimicking mangroves at a waterfront church in Fort Lauderdale, north of Miami. Traditional seawalls are flat, but theirs can be designed to mimic natural coastal features like the mangrove roots you’d find in Miami or barnacle clusters in New York. “We have a whole library of designs for different marine habitats, and the point is to attract the native species… create caves where they can hide from predators and also to dissipate waves," she said. Their technology dissipates at least 45% of wave energy, making it more resilient to overtopping and erosion. On one wall, researchers from Florida International University identified 51 species living in it one year after installation, including filter feeders like oysters and tubeworms that clean water. They’ve since installed 16 living seawalls across Florida for residential, commercial and government clients, she said. Soon they’ll put their first ones in California and New York and will be fortifying coastal bases for the U.S. Navy. The Vista Breeze affordable senior housing project in Miami Beach by the architectural firm Brooks Scarpa Huber is a real-world application of how to live with the threats o