Project Statement

Louisiana is facing a land loss crisis. Over the past century, the state has experienced massive changes to its landscape that pose challenges to many Louisianans. The 2023 Coastal Master Plan is a living document that guides and summarizes the state’s coastwide investments in risk reduction and coastal restoration projects.

Landscape architects led the document’s visual communications strategy: reframing the overall plan’s graphic identity, improving project and data visualizations, enhancing reading comprehension, and refocusing on a community-centric narrative structure. The plan demystifies the processes behind coastal risk reduction and restoration projects and communicates the value of the landscape and the livelihoods tied to it.

Project Narrative

Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost over 2,000 square miles of land to the Gulf of Mexico due to a suite of anthropogenic and environmental factors—a staggering loss exacerbated by climate change and intensifying storms. After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated coastal Louisiana in 2005, the Louisiana Legislature created the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), tasking it to coordinate federal, state, and local restoration efforts. Since 2007, the CPRA has developed a series of Coastal Master Plans to help evaluate and plan the wide variety of projects across the coast, harnessing the combined expertise of scientists, engineers, environmental professionals, policymakers, and Louisiana citizens to prepare for and respond to a climate-changed future. The plans have driven investment of over $21.4 billion in this critical landscape.

For the 2023 Coastal Master Plan, the landscape architects led an overarching visual communications strategy and graphic identity underpinning the document, as well as collateral for outreach and engagement—including model output maps, aerial regional views, explanatory diagrams, data visualizations, and fact sheets for each project, parish, community, and region. The broader goals of this three-year collaboration included enhancing the plan’s visual accessibility, comprehension, and weaving regional and local identity into the overall narrative.

A major shift in the plan was reframing the communication of a changed landscape. In previous iterations of the plan, land loss was shown on maps in red. The landscape architects reframed this to show land change in blue and green. This shift in visualization communicates that change is inevitable, but communities are able to adapt.

The team also redesigned icons to make them accessible to people with visual impairments, and updated engineering diagrams to visualize the potential of the landscape. Lived experience grounds the document, making clear how the everyday Louisianan can adapt for the future.

The project included the master plan document along with an executive summary, tailored fact sheets, an online data viewer, and two videos about the plan. Each piece of collateral empowers local leaders and residents to make decisions using information specific to them.

The fact sheets consist of data overviews of plan impacts and benefits at the Regional, Parish, Community, and Project levels. The online data viewer provides an even greater level of detail with the ability to find high-resolution benefits data, search projects, understand coastwide implementation, and more. The data viewer addresses two distinct types of users: first-time users can view an overview of the available information, while return users can explore multiple data sets to better fit their needs. The videos explain how the plan can help residents prepare for a changing landscape, what it means to plan with uncertainty, and how each project type is best utilized in the landscape.

Overall, the master plan functions as a long-term guide to restoration and risk reduction investments throughout the state, undertaken in parallel to related efforts to promote sustainable commercial and recreational activities across the coast.

The plan was unanimously approved by both the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority and the Louisiana Legislature in Spring of 2023, and is a key tool in organizing collective action and funding centered on protecting and restoring the coast.