Resilient Jacksonville

Resilient Jacksonville is the city's long-range plan for living with more water and more heat. The City of Jacksonville announced on Oct. 13, 2023 that Mayor Donna Deegan and Chief Resilience Officer Anne Coglianese had launched the 50-year resilience strategy during the opening session of the 2023 JEPB-UNF Environmental Symposium, and the mayor described it as a roadmap for addressing flood and heat risks. The strategy holds 45 actions, described as implementable policies, projects and programs, in its first chapter, and a second chapter that tailors and prioritizes those actions for different conditions on the ground in Jacksonville neighborhoods.

The Office of Resilience frames the plan as looking at the next 50 years of the city: adapting to a changing climate, accommodating a growing population, guiding new urban development and planning for shocks and stressors. In a consolidated city that covers all of Duval County, from the marshes along the Nassau and St. Johns rivers to the Beaches and the pine flatwoods of the Westside, that means one plan has to fit very different kinds of ground. The city says care was taken to make sure every corner of Jacksonville was studied.

Two hurricanes pushed the work along. The city says Resilient Jacksonville builds on many recent efforts in the wake of Hurricanes Matthew and Irma. The process page lists the efforts that came before the strategy and were folded into it: the Storm Resiliency and Infrastructure Development Review Committee, the Adaptation Action Area Workgroup, the Duval County Local Mitigation Strategy, the City Council Special Committee on Resiliency, the 2030 Comprehensive Plan update, tributary flood risk modeling, and a citywide heat mapping study by CAPA Strategies and UNF.

Outside pressure came from the city's own universities. In November 2019, Smart Cities Dive reported that 11 professors from the University of North Florida, Jacksonville University and Florida State College had written to Mayor Lenny Curry urging a climate action plan and a chief resilience or sustainability officer, arguing that Jacksonville was the only major Florida city without such an official or plan. The same report noted that the city's Adaptation Action Area Working Group had that spring recommended steps to protect Jacksonville from rising seas and flooding from the St. Johns River, but that a flood plan alone would not cover heat waves.

The strategy itself took 18 months. The city describes a six-phase process built on workshops, public meetings, surveys and discussions with hundreds of stakeholders, residents and subject matter experts in Jacksonville, and says the aim was to be rigorous with scientific data, inclusive in consultation, and equitable in addressing the disproportionate risks faced by marginalized and frontline communities.

The St. Johns Riverkeeper, which took part in developing the strategy, counted 45 actions and 90 sub-actions when it was released in October 2023, and in December 2023 listed the ones the City of Jacksonville was taking up first. Several are about the rules that shape building in Jacksonville: Action 1.1 updates the city's land development regulations, and Action 5 updates public works design standards to account for climate impacts and support resilient infrastructure.

Others deal with water and heat on the ground. Action 9 develops a green infrastructure program across Jacksonville based on stormwater science. Action 10.2 expands the tree canopy through an Urban Forest Management Plan. Action 24 invests in existing parks to increase stormwater management capacity and reduce urban heat. Action 19 strengthens Jacksonville's emergency response and evacuation plans.

The last group sets up the machinery. Action 40 establishes an Office of Resilience to carry the plan forward, with sub-action 40.2 calling for a compound flood model to identify the most flood-prone parts of Jacksonville. Action 43 calls for a Climate Action Plan aligning resilience with sustainability, and Action 44 commits the city to support regional resilience efforts in Northeast Florida.

The strategy resources rest on two studies. The Resilient Jacksonville Vulnerability Assessment analyzes the city's exposure to flooding, heat, wildfire and high winds under current and future conditions, to give decision makers science-based risk data. The Consequence Analysis compares hypothetical patterns of future development across Jacksonville, including a Future without Action scenario, using structured decision making to judge how much spatial planning could reduce flood damage. The city stresses that the scenarios are not predictions.

The office has also produced its own maps. Its Living Shoreline Suitability Model covers over 300 miles of shoreline within the St. Johns River watershed and sorts it by the kind of edge likely to work, from grey solutions such as bulkheads to green options such as living shorelines, so that Jacksonville shoreline projects are placed where they are most likely to succeed. An Urban Forest Management Plan storymap, tied to Action 10.2, sits alongside it on the city site.

Existing capital projects count as resilience work too. The process page lists the McCoys Creek Restoration Project and the Hogans Creek Restoration Project and the Emerald Trail Master Plan among the Jacksonville efforts the strategy builds on, alongside the Regional Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment.

The city reports steady implementation. Its 2024 annual update said the newly established Office of Resilience had added capacity to lead the work and that, in the first year alone, 38 of the 45 actions were underway. The Office of Resilience page now calls the strategy award-winning and has posted a 2025 Resilient Jacksonville Annual Update describing a science-based, data-driven approach tailored to the city's scale and complexity.

Action 43, the climate plan, has moved to the regional level. According to the Regional Climate Action Plan page, the City of Jacksonville was awarded a $1 million noncompetitive planning grant through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program to develop a climate action plan for the Jacksonville Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Duval, Clay, St. Johns and Nassau counties and the City of Palm Coast. The regional Priority Climate Action Plan was published in 2024, and the Comprehensive Climate Action Plan was scheduled for February 2026, under the Clean Air NEFL Initiative.

Neighborhood-scale work runs alongside the city plan. The St. Johns Riverkeeper and LISC Jacksonville launched Resilient Ribault in 2023 for the Ribault River and Moncrief Creek watersheds, tributaries of the St. Johns River that the Riverkeeper describes as highly vulnerable to flooding and pollution. The initiative, backed by a five-year grant from the Delores Barr Weaver Legacy Fund, includes GIS mapping and resident surveys by Jacksonville University geography professors, and tracks city infrastructure plans such as septic tank phase-out and incinerator ash remediation projects in the area.

The Riverkeeper's December 2023 review put the river at the center of the strategy, arguing that a resilient Jacksonville depends on a healthy St. Johns with the natural capacity to provide flood protection, erosion control and water quality filtration, and citing loss of wetlands and rising water levels described in its 2023 Lower St. Johns River Report.

Inside City Hall, resilience sits in the Planning Department next to the Office of Sustainability, which as of October 2026 lists Ashantae Green as Sustainability Manager on the city website. The Office of Resilience takes questions at resilience@coj.net; its staff page does not list names, so Anne Coglianese's title is stated here as of the October 2023 launch. Last verified: October 9, 2026, on the City of Jacksonville website.