Photos courtesy of the NOAA Digital Collection.

How to use this Compendium:

This resource is designed to help land use decision-makers in the 387 local jurisdictions that touch a Great Lakes shoreline to wisely manage their portion of our statewide treasure. As a Compendium, it collects and summarizes work done in a particular field of knowledge–in this case, Great Lakes Coastal management. Throughout the Compendium, links and acknowledgements point to other resources with deeper information on specific subjects. 

For those new to this role, or for those just embarking on a coastal management endeavor, begin with the Coastal Conundrum in Section I to get a broad understanding of the fundamental challenge of Great Lakes coastal management.

For those who have a grasp of the central tensions, Sections II and III provide a tour of the two basic, complementary approaches that land use decision-makers can use to support the health of both the water and the community: giving the water space to move, and providing a natural border between the water and the built environment. 

This is where many communities get stuck. The next question is the hard one: but which of these tools is right for us? No community will (or should!) implement all of them, so how do we know which ones to spend our precious capacity developing? Now is the time to move on to the Coastal Solutions Guide in Section IV. This Guide recommends a set of specific zoning changes for your community to consider based on the answer to a series of questions about your shoreline's physical characteristics, your regulatory capacity and conditions, the existing and likely future development on your shoreline, and your community values. Section V offers a detailed compendium of zoning and regulatory tools that support each approach, including potential obstacles to implementation, and successful examples. 

Once a package of zoning changes has been developed for your individual community to consider in its quest to support wise coastal management, the Getting It Done section offers advice and direction for moving from idea to implementation. This process begins with introducing it to the public and stakeholders, includes formal adoption processes, and continues into the future with periodic review, regular communication, and a readiness to adjust as conditions change...which they certainly will.