This talk shares “lessons from the road” from Climate Central’s Edge of America tour — during which we drove along America’s coasts from Maine to Texas and used our FloodVision technology to generate photorealistic flood visuals and finished-floor elevation (FFE) estimates, meeting people where they live and work. We saw the same pattern across roles and backgrounds: when residents and officials see places they care about experiencing plausible flood scenarios, abstract risk becomes more concrete, and conversations can shift to problem-solving.

We pair these field lessons with a demonstration of Coastal Risk Finder, our coastal risk mapping platform — redesigned after a year-long, 100+ stakeholder needs assessment and built to make complex science digestible. The platform lets users customize rising seas and coastal flood scenarios and immediately see a range of one-sentence “what this means for your place” takeaways, along with supporting content, graphics, and sources. Content is organized through persona-based user guides — for officials, community leaders, educators, and media — providing each audience with peer use cases and solutions-oriented steps. 

Our approach reflects more than a decade of building and hosting public tools, maps, reports, and visualizations grounded in peer-reviewed research and informed by coastal stakeholders. These resources have been shared by the news media tens of thousands of times, used by millions, and featured at the UN climate conference. 

We’ll show how officials use these visuals and tools for public awareness, emergency briefings, resilience planning, grants applications, and much more. Taken together, the lessons from the Edge of America Tour and Coastal Risk Finder’s design choices share a straightforward recipe for Gulf practitioners engaging with audiences and planning for resilience— lead with a local place; show climate-impact visuals, maps, and clear one-line takeaways; then link to solutions-oriented steps.