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This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The problem that RCOAST is trying to solve is a global one. We have 22,000 miles of coastlines that are actively eroding. That is projected to increase to 60,000 miles. We have US$9.5 trillion generated from coastal counties, and that’s in the US alone. It’s not just a local problem; it’s a global problem.

The climate adaptation problem that we’re trying to solve is giving people the intelligence they need to be able to adapt to coastal change and to build pathways where it’s financially feasible for a community or an individual to adapt.

We have one billion people living in vulnerable zones on our coastlines around the world. So we have to act local, think global. And for the first time, we have the capability of collecting data of what people are doing, how people are adapting, and we have the ability to be able to learn from that data. So if one community is deploying X solution, we can now share that around the world, and that’s something we’ve never really been able to do before.

So the problem we are solving is adapting intelligently on our coastlines, helping communities know what their options are and sharing the successes and failures across communities and building new adaptation pathways for those communities. We really believe that when we work together, we can build a more resilient tomorrow.

  It’s kind of ingrained in us that [climate change] is a future problem — except with coastal change, this is happening right now.

That’s manifesting as literal communities being displaced — physically, geographically moved from one spot to another. [For example] you have really interesting communities like Lagos, Nigeria, [which is like a] partial water world. It is really cool to see what they've done — they have water taxis, local kids in the community that go out and escort people around.

We also have [challenges] like Buxton, North Carolina, where we are down 19 houses in that one community [from coastal erosion and flooding]. We knew it was going to happen. We knew it was only a matter of time. Academics, scientists, they all saw that coming, and we kind of had decision paralysis at the federal, state, and local level, and community members that didn’t know what to do. The result were houses literally falling into the ocean, [becasuse] insurance companies won’t write a check until the house has fallen.


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  I’ve been working on this problem since I was an undergrad, but really even as a kid, I was fascinated by coastal change. The beach where I caught my first fish with my dad has eroded away. So it’s always been something that’s just on my mind and something I’m extremely interested in.

Because I got just so fascinated with this problem, I started collecting all the data that I could. I learned how to collect data as an undergrad student, then I did a Masters collecting more data on our beaches, and I’ve always been on the recovery side: how do dunes build? How do we recover from a storm?

What happened was — when I was really starting to get into this — I started building my own instruments because we didn’t have the instruments to capture the data we needed.

So I built the world’s first particle tracking velocimetry system to be deployed in a field environment on a beach. [That’s] the first sensor to be able to separate different types of particle motion for windblown sand — and that’s the fundamental mechanism for how dunes build.

So I’ve just spent my entire career being a data person, from building the sensors to analysing the data to writing code and to be able to translate that data and learn from that data.

What RCOAST is doing is we are collecting data of all of the different mitigation strategies that are being deployed to reduce coastal erosion right now. That can be 3D-printed coral reefs, or it can be simple sand fencing that’s being deployed. It can be vegetation that’s being planted. It can be big beach nourishment projects. There’s also all these new living shorelines that are popping up everywhere, and they can be used in a number of different environments.

What we do is we measure the performance of those different types of mitigation deployed in different types of environments. And when I say environments, I mean those solutions deployed in places that are sandy barrier islands, or are marsh-dominated environments, or mainland beaches, or rocky coast, etc.

We collect the data of how each of these mitigation solutions perform in different environments, and then we’re training a machine learner to tell us information that we can’t — as individual humans — comprehend.

Then we can then ask that dataset questions, like: “Hey, here’s a new area. This is the type of geologic setting it has. This is its local wind, waves, and tides, and this is the budget that they have. Tell me the best solution."

That’s what RCOAST is doing. We’re building a database, and we’re training a machine learner so that we can ask that database questions about how best to adapt.

Our customers are local and state governments. We’ve been directly through states, and we've been funded directly by municipalities. We also work for large homeowners associations or community associations [and] we work for NGOs who work on behalf of communities that can’t afford it [coastal resilience] or are disadvantaged in some way. So we’re really focused on that neighborhood-scale resilience.

To answer the question about if they’re willing to pay for it, they are already paying for it. Look at what’s happening to Buxton and their property at risk. Also those local communities, they generate tens of millions of dollars — if not hundreds of millions — in tax revenue. So what’s at stake here is massive on a financial scale, and people are already paying for it.

Usually communities don’t know what to do, so they turn to an engineering firm most often and ask them: “Okay, what do we do?” And then the engineering firm says: “All right, I’m gonna charge you to tell you how bad your erosion problem is. I’m gonna charge you to tell you what the solutions are, and then I’m going to say: ‘Oh, look at that. We can do the solution!’ So then I’m going to charge you to solve your problem.” So there's really no incentive for engineering firms to be able to try to reduce costs.

This is a big problem because that means we have biased intelligence versus neutral intelligence. At the state and federal level, we’re spending massive amounts of taxpayer dollars just trying to figure out what best to do, and we have to figure this out in a better way than what we’re doing right now.

The hardest part to explain is usually how we learn from our data — and it’s my favourite thing to really talk about! Imagine each new area that we’re scanning — let’s say Buxton, North Carolina; South Padre Island, Texas; Amelia Island, Florida, etc.

They all look different, and they have different winds and waves and tides. All of that is true. But with all of our coastlines around the world, there are these patterns that emerge.

So what we do is we build ‘data cakes’ for each of those locations, and I have to credit my colleague, Evan Goldstein, with helping me see these as ‘data cakes’. For any individual location [we gather] tons of information that’s geospatial, so that’s the bottom layer of the cake. Then we can add the wind, waves, and tides, so all the things acting on the [bottom layer of the] cake to make it erode. Then our RCOAST data, which is proprietary — it’s LIDAR, it’s RGB, it’s multi-spectral — and we’re collapsing time and adding that as a layer. And so then we put all of those ‘data cakes’ into a space where they start learning and talking to each other, and then from that, we can start predicting.

All that’s being developed right now, and we're really excited about it.

I started this company really in 2023. It’s when I left the Naval Research Lab to go full-time with RCOAST. It was late spring 2023. And I essentially didn’t pay myself for the first two years — and that was extremely hard.

I knew that to build the company that I wanted to build, to build a scalable company, that I would need investor funding. And having to split my time with very few people between building a solid foundation for the company, talking to customers and getting traction, and then getting investor funding and balancing investor relations — that’s like three full-time jobs, and you're not getting paid!

Also, when you’re raising money and you’re trying to get investor funding — most people that are raising money hear far more ‘Nos’ than ‘Yes’s’. And you have to really find your right investors. So we’ve been offered funding, and it just wasn’t a good fit for us, so we didn’t take funding in some cases.

So trying to figure out how to keep going when you’ve just had your 20th call of someone saying ‘No’, or you’ve spent months in due diligence and then the investor that you’ve built this awesome relationship with and that you respect so much says ‘No’ — it’s just hard to keep going.

But I genuinely believe in this problem. It’s what wakes me up in the morning, and I’m pretty addicted to it. I don't think I can stop, so that's what keeps me going.

When you talk about climate adaptation, you immediately — to a group of people around the world — get skeptics because people think that the climate isn’t changing. And so you have to learn how to navigate those conversations. And the thing that I like to remind people — and I wish I would’ve been able to articulate earlier — is that just because our climate is changing doesn’t mean that it’s challenging someone’s political belief.

And we’ve been changing. Humans change. Our environment changes. And we all are changing, so we are just experiencing this change right now that is extremely costly. So being able to really demonstrate that change isn’t negative, change is something that happens, it’s a natural process, whether you think that’s accelerated by humans or not is a moot point because this is where we are.

Being able to articulate that and respect someone’s opinion that they have — that might not be in line with yours — is a valuable lesson.

Also, with investors and trying to raise money if you’re in climate adaptation tech, you’re gonna find your right champions. So don’t sweat the ‘Nos’. Just keep going because you really are going to find those people who believe in what you're doing.

 I see a lot of funding in the wildfire area right now because it’s dominating the news. I think that’s a ‘good thing’ for wildfires because we need to mitigate that.

I also see a lot of money flowing into AI and data companies — that’s really important because I do believe AI has a massive grip on our future, whether we want it to or not, and we should take advantage of this incredible opportunity and time.

I think what I would like to see more funding flow to coastal erosion problems, 100%, but also funding to truly get good data because our AI models are literally only as good as the data and how you treat that data.

Raw data is often not going into these models. You have to do something with that data for the type of work that we are doing. There are some deep learning ways and methods, but right now you have to create data derivatives to be able to know how to interpret, how to ask it questions.

So I would love to see more funding and more investors in this space where they truly understand how to capture and create your own proprietary databases, how to fund and understand timelines for funding data derivative products that are needed for AI products, and also how to validate and build time in for the validation piece.

A machine learner will predict something, but you have to make sure that you’re validating it, and you have to make sure that what you’re predicting makes sense.

  I really believe in this transition from us being a reactive society to a proactive society, where we are actually building smarter years, decades in advance to the problem, and we’re not waiting until it’s too late for us to act, where we are burning more money by the day, and we’re having environmental degradation be a byproduct of that.

I really do believe that it’s possible now for us to transition our society, but we've got to have the money and the people willing to do it.

We are in this incredible moment in time where we have, for the first time, we’re able to collect Big Data. So I could initialize a bunch of drone pilots around the world right now, and we can collect data right now. We’ve never been able to do that before. We can now transfer that data, so we can send data, we can do all kinds of stuff. We can back it up.

But now with AI, we can learn from all that data. That is creating such an inflection point. That is the foundational, most exciting piece of my company, but also just this moment in time — if my company doesn’t do it, someone else’s will, where we actually transition from local knowledge, that old adage of ‘think local, act global’ or ‘act local, think global.’ It's here. We can scale things now, and I could not be more excited about being in that moment

What sorts of private organisations and financial institutions do you think could make use of coastal erosion and risk mitigation data?

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Thanks for reading!

Will Everill & Louie Woodall
Editor, The Adapt | Editor, Climate Proof