What Does Equity Look Like in Coastal Restoration?

This summer, we invite you to explore the experiences and accomplishments of our 2025-2026 Bass Connections project teams. This series features team-written profiles that showcase the discoveries, challenges and impact of teams who spent the year tackling real-world problems.

This year, the Advancing Equity in Coastal and Marine Restoration team explored how equity is understood and practiced in coastal and marine restoration. Through literature reviews, conference participation and interviews with practitioners, the team explored how restoration efforts can more meaningfully reflect the needs and perspectives of communities. Their work surfaced several key themes, including how equity is defined, why it matters for restoration outcomes and the challenges of implementing equitable approaches into practice. To share their insights, team members developed a StoryMap to engage practitioners and broader audiences in the conversation. 

This team was led by David Gill (Nicholas School of the Environment: Marine Science and Conservation), Sara Mason (Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability) and Rebecca Vidra (Nicholas School of the Environment: Environmental Sciences and Policy).

By: Members of the Advancing Equity in Coastal and Marine Restoration team

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Coastal and marine restoration has become increasingly important with shifting climates. Communities, practitioners and academic researchers are actively responding to adapt, restore and build local resilience to coastal communities and ecosystems. As restoration projects rise in prominence, a growing body of science follows suit. “Restoration science,” while often thought of as a natural or biological science, also intersects with the social sciences. Restoration projects often have the most tangible impacts on the communities around them, yet these effects are the least understood and are rarely measured. 

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Our 2025-2026 Bass Connections project team sought to understand the tools that define, implement and evaluate equity in the full life cycle of coastal and marine restoration efforts, from project design and planning to long-term monitoring and management. Team members came in with diverse backgrounds – natural sciences, social sciences and community engagement – and brought differing perspectives around how to understand equity in restoration. Our team found David Gill’s work developing the Ocean Equity Index (OEI) to be a widely applicable framework (Figure 1). 

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We began our work to understand approaches to equity in restoration with a literature review, assessing 44 papers using a framework comparison tool we developed. The tool was designed to extract different understandings and approaches to equity in coastal and marine restoration. The papers were coded for ecosystem type, geography, targeted audience and the presence of recognitional, procedural and distributional equity (as seen in the OEI) to identify common patterns and knowledge gaps. Later, we compared this review with grey literature, specifically the UN’s standards guiding document to understand the inclusion of equity across publications.

In October 2025, team members attended the Society for Ecological Restoration North American Conference. They presented preliminary findings from the literature review in a poster session and gathered feedback from conference attendees. Additionally, the team hosted a lunch at the conference, where attendees shared how they defined equity and how they would like to see equity incorporated into restoration projects and offered examples from their own work. The conference helped identify potential practitioners to interview later in our research process.

In the spring semester, team members conducted six interviews with restoration practitioners whose work focuses on shoreline restoration efforts in the United States and territories. The interviews explored perspectives on defining and implementing equity across a variety of ecosystems, including rivers, mangroves, oyster reefs and shellfish restoration.

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Drawing from the completed literature review, feedback from the conference and perspectives from interviews, our team was able to highlight case studies that can serve as models for equitable restoration efforts. One key example is the Swinomish Tribe clam garden restoration at Kiket Island in Washington State, which centers Indigenous stewardship, tribal leadership and culturally important food access. We were also able to highlight example frameworks like the Just Seascape Restoration model from Armstrong et al. 2025 (Figure 2). This framework demonstrates how equity fits into coastal restoration and offers a model of implementable practices for how communities of people can coexist with communities of marine life and promote fair processes and outcomes throughout their projects.

Through the process, our key takeaways center on defining equity and its benefits, as well as the challenges to implementation. In many interviews, practitioners defined equity broadly and viewed inclusive decision-making as already a core part of restoration practice. Further, we found that equity in restoration means centering community knowledge and priorities rather than applying a one-size-fits-all model. Practitioners also viewed equity as an important element in improving public access to restored sites, strengthening relationships between communities and the natural world, and as potential resources to create local jobs and support economic stimulus for communities. Restoration projects were also cited as sources of funding through small grant programs to support community-led efforts.

Despite the benefits equity provides to restoration, there are clear challenges. For example, power dynamics shape outcomes: consultants and contractors can dominate projects, while stronger community engagement often requires building local capacity and compensating members for their time and input. In turn, equity is often easier to promise than to implement, since it remains difficult to track and fund, particularly when donors prioritize ecological outcomes over social ones. 

Learn More

• Browse additional news and updates from Bass Connections.
• Explore additional teams in the Brain & Society theme.
• Learn about the project team experience through stories from students.

Main image: Clam Gardening - Kiket Island, WA