At daybreak on October 6, 2016, Lowe Sound was a quaint seaside fishing community at the northern tip of Andros Island, The Bahamas. By lunchtime, it was all but gone. Hurricane Matthew, the most powerful Atlantic storm in a decade, struck the island at around 8 o’clock that morning. Over the course of five brutal hours, winds snapped utility poles, ripped trees out from their roots, and tossed cars around like toys. Old wooden homes were literally blown to pieces. But it was the shallow waters off the coast that wreaked the most havoc. “The sound has only about 4 feet of water during high tide,” says Ivan Ferguson, the town administrator. “No one thought it was a threat.”

They were wrong. “The surge—15 feet of surge—rushed onto the land,” says Ferguson. The wall of water obliterated coastal cafes, swallowed supply stores, and inundated areas up to 4 miles inland. Ferguson recounts stories of homes filling with seawater, frantic parents in chest-high waters holding babies above their heads. Even the deceased weren’t left in peace. Caskets and crypts from a seaside cemetery were washed into the street and onto people’s lawns, the human remains they once contained now a part of history.

It’s hard to look at even two months later. “Oh my God. There were homes all along here,” says Katie Arkema, her eyes welling up. “There were people hanging out, singing, listening to music.” Arkema, a lead scientist with an organization called the Natural Capital Project, or NatCap, has been a regular on Andros since July 2015. An ecologist based at Stanford University, Arkema began her career studying how changes to one ecosystem—kelp forests, for example—have a domino effect, impacting neighboring natural areas, like reefs, and their inhabitants. But for her, there was always an important component missing: people. She joined NatCap to give her work a more real-life, human connection. Unfortunately, in circumstances such as this, that can also bring heartbreak. “It’s so, so sad this had to happen,” she says, shaking her head.

NatCap, as its name implies, views natural ecosystems and their components as capital, as assets whose inherent features generate a positive return for society. Mangroves, for example, buffer coasts from storm surge and sap the energy of waves. These are hugely valuable services, but they often go completely unnoticed. Arkema has spent the last year and a half assessing areas across Andros, in part, to identify where and how local ecosystems could potentially be restored, expanded, or even newly introduced to help protect communities from catastrophes like the one that struck here in October.

Indeed, early analyses by Arkema and her team had flagged Lowe Sound as being at very high risk for major storm damage long before the hurricane hit. A key factor in this dire assessment was the shallow, shelf-like sound itself, a perfect platform upon which ocean waters can quickly rise under extreme conditions. “Where it’s really wide and flat, the water can just build, build, build up on it,” explains Arkema. To make matters worse, mangroves that once fringed Lowe Sound were removed in 2009 and replaced by a road and sidewalk, protected by a three-foot-high seawall. If the mangroves had been left in place, would it have averted this disaster? “For sure it would have done something,” says Arkema. “Whether or not it would have been able to prevent all this damage, I don’t know.” We’re in Lowe Sound now, in part, to figure this out.

To this end, Arkema and her team document anything and everything that influences water dynamics. They measure the slope of the beach, and how it changes, from the water line to the dry shore. They note any shoreline vegetation, like seagrape or mangrove, as well as the structure of the shore itself, because mud, sand, and rock affect water flow to varying degrees. They survey the nearshore for seagrass and corals, and record their location and depth. They even measure the length and width of seagrass blades and the diameter of sand grains. It all matters. Meanwhile, a drone flies overhead, capturing a bird’s-eye view of mangrove stands, sandbars, seagrass beds, and patch reefs, and their locations relative to roads, homes, and other infrastructure.

Balancing competing interests is a challenge that NatCap was born to tackle. A rag-tag cast of ecologists, economists, software developers, and other specialists, the organization was founded in 2005 with the goal of aligning, and finding a better balance between, economics and ecology. In practice, it’s a bit more lopsided than that: It’s really about protecting nature from shortsighted, business-as-usual behavior by making its value more tangible—spelling out how we depend on it, what we get from it—and expressing those benefits in business-as-usual terms. This way, decision makers who may traditionally consider an ecosystem an impediment to progress—like a wetland that must be drained to build a subdivision—would instead consider clear, quantifiable advantages to keeping it around—to be a natural sponge that keeps a nearby city center from flooding.

The government of The Bahamas has long recognized the need to develop Andros—and to both harness and sustain its natural resources. They called in NatCap to help them figure out how to balance all three objectives. 

The process starts simply. “First round, we chat with people,” explains Arkema. “‘What do you want? What’s important to you?’ And the crabs come up, and the lobsters. Protections from storms. High-quality tourism. And we can start to model and evaluate those things.” In this case, working with the University of The Bahamas, The Nature Conservancy, and a local environmental consultant, the team met with Androsians across the island to document how they make a living and what natural areas they visit or depend on. They held town meetings to discuss community-wide concerns—say, an unsafe port or the need for a library.

They also handed out blank maps of Andros. “We asked them, ‘What areas shouldn’t be touched by development, and why?’” says Arkema’s colleague Katherine Wyatt, an Ecosystem Services Analyst with NatCap. “So many people circled similar areas on the map saying, ‘This is really important lobster nursery habitat,’ and pointing out bonefish nesting sites and sponging sites.” People also expressed their ideas for development—which were, well, all over the map. Some wanted a web of new roads and ports for cruise ships, while others didn’t want anything that could risk damaging their natural resources. 

The team combined this information with data from scientific journals, government reports, and image databases—about 250 sources in all—to flesh-out the full picture. On-the-ground assessments, like the work in Lowe Sound, plugged any remaining holes.

Ultimately, these efforts provided a detailed picture of the island’s resources, the most important benefits derived from them, and the main activities in each region—plus a sort of consensus of local opinion. “It’s really important to make sure that lots of different voices are heard,” says Arkema.

It also gave NatCap all the baseline data it needed to build a virtual world, like the digital coast for Lowe Sound. Now, just as the NatCap scientists can simulate waves hitting digitally reconstructed shores, they can model the impact of development on the island and how it would likely ripple through Andros’s communities. 

This is not an elementary analysis. In fact, its complexity is difficult to wrap your head around. To demonstrate, in wave-impact analyses alone, the team’s models start off with known values for the density of seawater, pull of gravity, and the initial height and speed of waves offshore. Then, using physics-based formulae, they compute how these waves evolve as they approach the specific coastline being assessed—how they respond to changes in local relief and how they lose energy as they break and experience drag from vegetation and friction with the seabed. These effects depend on detailed features of the habitat—like those collected for Lowe Sound—and are calculated using different coefficients of influence for each “object” (e.g., a seagrass blade) amplified by its total coverage, density, and depth from the surface. And all of this is just to determine the size and speed of waves that strike a coast. From there, equally complex models estimate erosion and other impacts, and still others work out the costs of property damage based on such information as local real estate sales and tax assessment data. 

Extrapolate this ‘simple’ analysis—modeling habitat-based coastal protections for a single region—to the entire island, scientifically assessing each ecosystem and resource, and adding to this all development projects in each area and their respective impacts on both nature and people, plus feedback loops among all of these factors, and it starts to become clear why NatCap’s simulations inch close to reflecting reality.

“We have all the pine yards, the biggest barrier reef, the largest fishin’ nursery,” grunts Stephen Smith, as he drives a pickaxe into a hardened pile of aragonite. “Of all the places in the world, we have the most blue hole. We have vast everything in this place,” he continues, taking another swing. “Everything in abundance, untouched,” he says, as he leans the pick against a pine. Smith, Andros’s sole warden, is using the cement-like material to make trails to a blue hole nestled in a pine forest.

Smith knows how nature works—and how to work with nature. “I’ve had my own operations most of my life—deep-sea fishin’, huntin’, commercial fishin’, the whole shebang, and it was good to me.” He grew up on the water. His father Charlie started the first bonefishing lodge on Andros, and is a legendary figure in fly fishing circles, as the creator of the iconic “Crazy Charlie” fly found today in dozens of variants around the globe.

As a warden who has worn many hats, Smith knows better than most that for the master plan to play out as intended, the ecosystems and resources must be protected, but not blocked from use. “Everything in Andros you can do, just monitor what you’re doin’. Think about the future generation. That’s how this whole operation run,” says Smith.

An oversimplification for sure, but such an honor system mostly works because the island is chock-full of sustainability buffs. Case in point: bonefish lodge owner Bethell. He lays down strict ground rules with his guides, and his guests. “We don’t touch the fish. We don’t take it out of the water, period,” he explains. Touching it can damage its mucous barrier that protects it against bacteria and parasites. If one of his guides allows it? “That’s their resignation,” he says. He also crimps the barbs on his hooks, so the fish slip off easily, and uses heavier tackle than necessary to land them more quickly. Further, he limits the number of guests staying at his lodge to a maximum of six anglers at any one time. “Otherwise it’s too much pressure on the fish,” he says. “We have to fish for tomorrow.” Although few are as intense as Bethell, most businesses recognize their dependence on nature and are careful to keep it healthy.

The fisheries are the biggest challenge. Making it easier for people like Forbes to do their jobs opens up a dangerous can of worms ecologically speaking. There are already serious issues—like lobster fishermen who use bleach and soap to flush the critters out of reef crevices. And these things incur real punishments, such as jail time, fines, and unique penalties for people without the cash to pay up. “Fishermen in Lowe Sound have been required to go out and fish for weeks without profit – their catches instead being distributed to the elderly,” says Smith’s boss, Leslie Brace, who heads the Andros arm of The Bahamas National Trust, a nongovernmental organization in charge of national parks. But with Smith as the only warden, enforcement is spread extremely thin—although Smith says it’s better than it seems. “I have eyes all over—fly fishin’ guides, sport-fishin’ people. I call ‘em—‘Hey, check out the middle bights. See what’s goin’ on there.’ I don’t have to be everywhere,” he says.

Nonetheless, the island has a long way to go to ensure its resources aren’t abused. To this end, the master plan strengthens existing regulations and jumpstarts a whole new management strategy that includes island-wide stock assessments, new catch limits and seasonal closures, and the training of fishermen in sustainable harvest methods. Importantly, fishermen themselves are to be involved in each step. “You can’t alienate people,” says Brace. “They have to own it.”

Indeed, that in a nutshell is the entire point of NatCap’s participatory planning process. Unfortunately, however, community involvement was sometimes limited—mainly due to a widespread lack of faith in the government. “People are really skeptical that the government is going to follow through,” says Wyatt. Smith links this to previous government-run projects that went nowhere. “They asked for input but did what they wanted at the end of the day,” he says. Many Androsians assumed NatCap’s outreach was more of the same. “We sit down and let them come in and tell us a bunch of lies and things—Oh, that again. Tell me something different,” Sheila, a fed-up hotel owner near Smith’s blue hole trail, told me. And because of it, Sheila and many others like her view NatCap’s models and maps, indeed the entire project, as one giant fantasyland. “It ain’t real,” she said. “I don’t need no plan to tell me how to live.”

But Smith disagrees. “If you don’t make a plan then you can’t see where you’re goin’. It’s like buildin’ a house. If you have the foundation wrong, then you’re gonna have a problem with the roof,” Smith says. “We’re walkin’ blind. Andros needs that development plan.”

The plan was finalized with the Office of the Prime Minister at the end of February 2017, but no one is just sitting around celebrating. The Bahamas National Trust is building a network of birding and blue hole trails; roads are being paved and retrofitted with culverts to improve tidal flow with mangroves; and the Bethells are bringing in scientists to tag and monitor sawfish, sharks, and of course bonefish. Meanwhile, NatCap is in talks to reproduce this work on other Bahamian islands, and engineers like Lakin Hope are pricing out habitat-based coastal protections up and down the coast, based on NatCap’s ongoing analyses.

Androsians have chosen a promising future, and this story is just getting started, but now at least they know where they want to go—and how to get there.