Georgia Sea Grant secured funding from the Department of Defense and the National Sea Grant College Program to hire Michelle Covi as the country’s first Coastal Resilience DOD Liaison in 2021. For the last year, Covi has created a suite of reports and resources that are now being used by Sea Grant programs, military installations, and coastal resilience specialists across the region to inform collaborative resilience projects.

Through a joint competition with the U.S. Coastal Research Program (USCRP), ten new projects were selected for a total of $3.9 million in funding to translate research into application for communities. Additionally, Sea Grant programs across the nation received an additional total of $4.2 million in NOAA Sea Grant funds to increase local capacity, engagement, research, and implementation for addressing resilience challenges. 

Community planners and decision makers now have an application guide to help them plan for the significant sea level rise the United States is expected to see in the next 30 years. The guide is a response to the 2022 Interagency Sea Level Rise report, which projected about a foot of higher waters, on average, along U.S. coastlines by 2050. 

The National Sea Grant College Program has announced that a regional collaborative of Sea Grant fisheries extension specialists, university scientists and fisheries managers will receive $2.4 million to develop and implement extension and outreach programming related to data and information from three large research projects focused on estimating the number of reef fish in the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
 

NOAA’s National Sea Grant College Program and Office of Sustainable Fisheries awarded approximately $900,000 of FY21 federal funds to support projects that will initiate “Food from the Sea'' career development programs. With these funds, Sea Grant programs and partners will work collaboratively with members of the fishing industry to identify training needs and develop updated and/or new resources and programming to address those needs.