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Abstract Actions to reduce flood risk often appear to run counter to other societal goals, and resolving these conflicts is important as flood adaptations increasingly transform settlements and societies. Here, we evaluate the tensions between flood risk reduction and other priorities in the context of voluntary buyouts of flood-prone properties in the United States—a controversial flood response to restore land to open space, but with trade-offs. We apply a nation-wide systematic review (133 literature references, 1983–2023) to assess goals stated for buyouts and combine it with a comprehensive media analysis (281 media articles, 1993–2023) to compare those goals to the experiences and results perceived by buyout implementers, residents, and other practitioner groups. Across the systematic-review literature, flood risk reduction dominates goals expressed for buyouts (62.6% of documented goals), and local government predominates in this goal setting (61.7% of documented goals). However, involved and affected actors—especially residents—perceive outcomes beyond flood risk reduction, most notably in the experiences of buyout implementation itself (35.5% of documented resident perceptions) and in results impacting social and economic priorities (49.5%). Despite the difficulties of buyouts, the systematic-review literature largely reflects positive perceived outcomes (79.4% of outcome sentiments, weighing each buyout location equally), but nonprofit organizations and residents perceive largely negative outcomes. Media coverage related to buyouts is more negative than positive but with improved sentiments through time. Our findings point to the importance of designing, implementing, and evaluating flood adaptations not just as flood control measures given their consequences for other societal objectives. The uneven documentation on buyouts also implies opportunities to learn from contexts where buyouts have been integrated into everyday life with little fanfare, through mechanisms either novel or perhaps routine, yielding insights into making ambitious climate adaptations a common, more ordinary, and increasingly imperative occurrence. 

Historical adaptation pathways (HAP) analyses identify sequences of multi-causal factors that shape climate change adaptation actions. Such analyses can be valuable for understanding why systems respond differently to climate risks, assessing important adaptation drivers and constraints, and identifying potential path dependencies. This paper synthesizes existing (and still emerging) HAP methods in order to present a more standardized and generalized approach to studying historic adaptations. The proposed method combines inductive and deductive approaches and draws on established practices from grounded theory to increase validity, including process tracing, memoing, construct definition, and member checking. This approach is designed to provide historical and contextual information that can be incorporated into a decision model or be shared with stakeholders and community members. In addition, future comparative studies based on this replicable approach could allow for theorization as to the casual mechanisms that engender successful adaptation. The approach is illustrated using a coastal adaptation case study in South Carolina, USA, with one of the main insights being that the island would not exist in its current form without the actions taken by concerned citizens, whose efforts ultimately helped combat the erosion caused (in part) by local jetties. Several areas for methodological improvement and theoretical development are also noted, as the aim of this work is both to enable cross-study comparisons of future HAP research – which can inform adaptation practice – and to provide a method that can be improved upon in future iterations. 

Flood damage has severe and long-term repercussions for households and communities, and continued housing development in floodplains escalates damages over time. Policies and interventions to reduce damage depend on assumptions about housing stock and residents, but assessments of flood exposure to date largely focus on community-scale characteristics at a single point in time, masking potential within-community differences and their evolution through time. We measure residential development in the floodplain nationwide over time to characterize the type and value of U.S. floodplain housing stock and to assess how new development contributes to flood exposure. Over 4M U.S. residences built from 1700 to 2019 (4.8% of all residences built during that time) are located within current regulatory floodplains. These residences are concentrated at the affordable and expensive extremes of the housing value spectrum, reflecting deep differences in the social vulnerability of floodplain residents. Floodplain housing stock often differs substantially from the local market, with coastal floodplains containing relatively expensive housing and inland floodplains containing relatively affordable housing. New housing development has not occurred equally across these contexts. In the past two decades, more floodplain development has occurred in communities with relatively expensive floodplain housing, and mobile home construction in floodplains has slowed. The bifurcated patterns in floodplain housing, across values and geographies, demonstrate the importance of considering the specific population at risk and how it may differ from the broader community when tailoring flood risk management approaches.