Protecting Black Heritage at American Beach

The American Beach Heritage Project (ABHP) advances a decolonial, community-led approach to climate resilience that merges engineering, ethnography, and GIS-based analysis.  In alignment with CHART’s mission to protect coastal heritage through community-informed strategies, the work centers oral histories, Black ecological knowledge, and relational values to understand and respond to the intersecting threats of climate change and historical erasure. Rather than positioning communities solely as beneficiaries, the project is co-created with residents through participatory mapping, focus groups, and the development of composite resilience metrics. This methodology challenges extractive models by placing data from community knowledge on equal footing with other types of scientific data, offering a replicable model for collaborative resilience planning in at-risk heritage landscapes.