What is Resilience?

Resilience is the ability to adapt to changing conditions and withstand—and rapidly recover from—disruption due to emergencies. In other words, it means bouncing back after something bad happens. This ability to overcome, or bounce back, is a concept that applies to individuals, to communities large and small, to our infrastructure, and to the environment.

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Maryland's Coastal Atlas

​​​Having an easy-to-use and transparent platform to share spatial information early in the planning process allows users to identify potential conflicts so that they can then b​e avoided or addressed. Spatial data are essential for many planning activities, including siting of renewable energy projects, designing restoration projects, and helping communities identify areas vulnerable to sea level rise, flooding, and erosion. The newest layer, BUILD (Beneficial Use - Identifying Locations for Dredge), is helping planners match restoration projects with dredging to reduce costs and promote coastal resilience.

Map showing how the land has disappeared since the early 1900s 


What is Maryland Doing?​​


King Tide Downtown Annapolis

Maryland has experienced changes in its climate over the last century and on the whole, the State is experiencing warmer winters and summers, wetter autumns and springs, and drier summers. In the future, it is expected that climate change will affect Maryland in a variety of ways. More obvious impacts could include an increased risk for extreme events such as drought, storms, flooding, and forest fires; more heat-related stress; the spread of existing or new vector-born disease; and increased erosion and inundation of low-lying areas along the State’s shoreline and coast. Adaptation, together with mitigation, is necessary to address climate change.

Climate change adaptation is an extremely complex process and there is no single means of response. That said, the State is already taking steps to enhance the resilience of a broad spectrum of natural and human-based systems to the consequences of climate change.