By Coral Gables Gazette staff
Miami-Dade County has no shortage of climate-resilience plans.
It has regional plans, county plans, municipal plans and neighborhood plans addressing flooding, sea-level rise, hurricanes, extreme heat, infrastructure, transportation and land use. But a new University of Miami study asks a more difficult question: whether those plans actually work together.
The answer, according to the researchers, is only partly.
Published in Sustainable Cities and Society, the study examined 37 resilience plans across Miami-Dade and found that while many of them identify similar threats and propose similar solutions, they often lack the coordination, feedback loops and evaluation tools needed to function as a unified long-term strategy.
A yearlong review of 37 plans
The study was led by Sarbeswar Praharaj, an assistant professor in the University of Miami’s Department of Geography and Sustainable Development and director of the university’s Master of Professional Studies in Urban Sustainability and Resilience Program, and Shouraseni Sen Roy, a professor in the same department.
Three students — Sofia Bond, Mirna Obeid and Tyreke Walker — also contributed to the research, titled “Urban Planning for Climate Resilience: Evaluating Multi-level Network of Resilience Plans in Miami-Dade County.”
“Miami-Dade has an extensive network of plans that contribute to resilience building,” Praharaj said. “Our study took over a year, and rather than looking at these plans in isolation, we examined how they interact as a network to support coordinated implementation.”
That distinction is central to the study. Rather than grading individual documents alone, the researchers evaluated how plans connect across jurisdictions and policy areas — and whether the system of plans is strong enough to guide coordinated action.
Flooding dominates the agenda
Flood resilience and coastal environmental protection emerged as the most common priorities across the plans reviewed.
Recurring strategies included expanding green space and park systems, improving canals and drainage infrastructure, elevating roads, strengthening stormwater systems and installing flood barriers. Some plans also emphasized restoring natural systems, including mangroves, as storm-surge buffers with broader ecological benefits.
But the study found that shared themes do not necessarily produce coordinated action.
Many plans operate in silos, with limited coordination between agencies and jurisdictions. Few include mechanisms for tracking how actions in one plan might affect — or support — another. The researchers also found that public health, social equity and the needs of vulnerable populations received less attention than physical infrastructure projects.
The result is a planning landscape with many serious documents but not enough connective tissue among them.
Neighborhood plans score higher
One of the study’s notable findings runs against the assumption that larger, better-resourced plans automatically perform better.
Neighborhood-level plans, including the Cutler Bay Flood Mitigation Plan and the Little River Adaptation Plan, generally scored higher than regional and county plans on measures such as community responsiveness and implementation. The researchers attributed that performance to closer alignment with residents’ needs and stronger stakeholder engagement during the planning process.
The finding does not mean neighborhood plans can replace larger regional planning. Instead, it suggests that broader resilience efforts may need to borrow more from the local planning process: clearer connection to residents, more specific implementation steps and stronger mechanisms for public feedback.
Why it matters for Coral Gables
For Coral Gables, the study lands close to home.
The city has its own resilience concerns, from stormwater and sea-level-rise planning to hurricane preparedness, tree canopy, infrastructure hardening and flood protection. But the UM study points to a broader question facing every municipality in the county: whether local plans are designed to connect with county and regional efforts, or whether each remains one more document in a fragmented system.
That question matters because flooding, storm surge, drainage, transportation and infrastructure do not stop at municipal boundaries. A project in one jurisdiction can affect residents, roads, waterways or utilities in another.
The study’s central warning is not that Miami-Dade lacks plans. It is that plans alone are not enough if agencies and governments cannot track how their work overlaps, where gaps remain and whether investments are producing benefits across the larger network.
“Plans don’t fail because communities lack good ideas,” Praharaj said. “The challenge is ensuring that strategies developed by different agencies and jurisdictions communicate with one another, complement each other, and evolve together as conditions change.”
A platform to connect the work
The researchers recommend that Miami-Dade move beyond a patchwork of individual planning efforts toward a more coordinated planning network, with stronger cross-agency collaboration and clearer monitoring and evaluation systems.
With support from the National Science Foundation, the team is sharing its findings through stakeholder meetings, social media and community networks. It is also developing a centralized platform intended to integrate resilience plans, projects and investments so local governments can better coordinate initiatives and track progress over time.
Although the study focuses on Miami-Dade, the researchers say the framework can be applied to other coastal cities facing similar layers of climate planning and local governance.
For South Florida, the takeaway is direct: the region may already know many of the projects and policies it needs. The harder task is making sure they add up to a system.
