Coastal Communities' Responses to Environmental Disruption is an internationally collaborative research project based out of Wageningen University & Research with co-investigators and student teams at Southern Connecticut State University and Leiden University. Our research is established to better describe, understand, and evaluate how coastal communities react and act to punctuated environmental changes to their water, land, and ways of life, and identify opportunities for local community and policy, governance, and/or private sector collaborations. Our interdisciplinary team uses a mixed methods approach to engage communities directly in order to co-produce and co-design our research. Practically, this means we are listening and leveraging our positions and associated resources at the academy to work with communities as appropriate. We do this by having conversations and conducting interviews, incorporating arts-based methods for communication beyond words, spending time in community, digging through archives, creating new maps, and offering relevant workshops. We intend to learn along with coastal communities what possibilities present in these unique dynamic environments for living with water that sets them apart and then connect these epistemologies across continents and oceans. We work on the premise that coastal communities are inherently resilient, adaptive, and innovative shaped with and by the dynamic spaces they occupy. We are interested to arrive at appropriate and place-based solutions needed for punctuated environmental changes, and learn from these places how other communities can prepare for environmental disruptions in the form of storms, sea-level rise, salinization, and coastal erosion. Further, we aim to create opportunities for policy-makers and planners to incorporate local innovations into community-appropriate planning for future planetary changes as well as identify communication pathways for incorporating appropriate coordinated responses based on local experiences into policy. Finally, we hope to create a series of educational publications, maps, exhibitions, and other place-contextualized outputs to face the community and the academy.