The Dutch Dialogues^® Charleston final report has been published! It is available online at dutchdialoguescharleston.org

Dutch Dialogues^® Charleston is an effort by many individuals, organizations, partners, and professionals who offered time and resources to co-create for Charleston a pathway to resilience and reduced flooding while maintaining its historic beauty and iconic identity.

Charleston is and will remain a water city and thus our focus is properly on water: surge, tidal, rainfall, stormwater, drainage, surface, groundwater, and combinations thereof.

Charleston’s long-term survival will, in a large part, be determined by how the community manages its flood and sea-level rise risks. While social, economic and equity challenges were beyond our scope, we touched upon some of those to highlight opportunities to address those through the context of water.

Water is not something to exploit or control; it is something to respect, manage and embrace. Acknowledging and accepting the water system’s primacy, however, yields sober choices but also aspirational options. As Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu observed, “If you don’t change direction you may end up where you are heading.” What follows in this report is, we believe, a pathway towards a safer Charleston.