By KeyCrew Media
Chronic tidal flooding is no longer a distant climate scenario for coastal design professionals that, according to Albert Slap, founder of RiskFootprint, architects are already ethically and professionally obligated to identify, disclose, and address. Slap argues that the design community has been slow to recognize that King Tide flooding, predictable, recurring inundation that occurs without storms, falls squarely within existing professional codes of ethics and disclosure requirements. Firms that lack documented evidence of having assessed and communicated this risk to clients are accumulating liability exposure they may not yet recognize.
King Tides as a Design Variable, Not a Climate Abstraction
Slap draws a sharp distinction between storm surge, a dramatic, event-driven hazard that design professionals have long incorporated into coastal siting decisions, and King Tide flooding, which he describes as a chronic, predictable condition already affecting properties multiple times per year in many coastal markets.
“King Tides are no longer rare events,” Slap says. “They are predictable, measurable, and accelerating. They reveal which properties will face chronic flooding long before storms arrive.” A property that floods several times annually without a storm faces a fundamentally different set of operational and structural challenges than one exposed only to episodic event risk. For architects, that distinction matters at the siting stage, the drainage design stage, and the access planning stage, all of which carry long-term consequences for building performance and occupant safety.
The predictability of King Tide flooding is what makes it a professional obligation rather than an optional consideration, according to Slap. Unlike probabilistic storm scenarios, King Tide inundation can be mapped with high confidence using current NOAA data and projected forward to 2040 and 2060 using NOAA Intermediate-High sea level rise curves. An architect who fails to consult available data on a known, mappable hazard occupies a different professional position than one who fails to anticipate an unforeseeable event.
The AIA Ethics Framework and Where Disclosure Obligations Begin
Slap contends that the American Institute of Architects’ code of ethics, combined with ASTM standards for property resilience assessment, creates a clear framework of obligations for design professionals working in coastal markets. “Their code of ethics and disclosure obligations require them to research sea level rise, identify potential King Tide flooding, discuss these risks with clients, and incorporate resilience considerations into design,” he says.
That four-part obligation, research, identify, discuss, incorporate, is not aspirational language, in Slap’s view. It is a professional standard that, when unmet, creates exposure to liability claims and potential disciplinary action. When parcel-specific King Tide data is available and an architect does not consult it, Slap argues, the failure to disclose becomes harder to defend.
The liability risk compounds over the long time horizons involved in building design. A structure sited today will be in use in 2040 and 2060, the same years for which NOAA sea level rise projections are now available. An architect who designs a building without accounting for projected King Tide conditions at those future dates may find, years later, that the structure faces chronic access impairment or drainage failure that was foreseeable at the time of design. “This is not optional,” Slap says. “It is part of responsible practice.”
Documentation as a Defensibility Record
Slap argues that the practical response for design professionals is not simply to assess King Tide risk, it is to document that the assessment was conducted, that findings were communicated to the client, and that design decisions reflect the disclosed risks. In a liability context, the absence of that documentation record is as significant as the absence of the assessment itself.
The distinction between a manual consulting engagement and an automated assessment tool matters here. A custom consulting report may provide detailed analysis, but it is expensive, slow, and inconsistently available across project types and budget levels. An automated tool that delivers parcel-specific King Tide inundation data, current and projected, in seconds creates a reproducible, documented record that can be incorporated into standard project workflows regardless of project scale.
“With NOAA’s current King Tide data and NOAA Intermediate-High sea level rise projections for 2040 and 2060, architects can site buildings more intelligently, design for future access and drainage, and advise clients on long-term resilience,” Slap says. The goal, in his framing, is not to alarm clients but to ensure that risk disclosure and design response are documented before a project breaks ground.
RiskFootprint’s Approach to Defensible Natural Hazard Risk Assessment
Slap’s firm, RiskFootprint, has developed what he describes as the only automated SaaS platform that provides parcel-specific King Tide maps for current conditions (2026), 2040, and 2060, integrating NOAA Sea Level Rise Viewer data, NOAA Intermediate-High SLR projections, and NASA ocean sensor and satellite altimetry data into a single, property-level output delivered in seconds.
According to RiskFootprint’s own description, the platform aligns with the ASTM Property Resilience Assessment Standard (E 3429-24), which structures hazard analysis beginning with comprehensive exposure identification. Slap positions it as a tool that supports not just disclosure but the broader professional standard of care that ASTM and AIA frameworks describe.
For architects working in coastal markets, Slap’s argument reduces to a practical question: whether King Tide assessment becomes a standard line item in commercial real estate due diligence, comparable to geotechnical investigation or flood zone determination, or remains an optional step that some firms take and others skip. As chronic tidal flooding becomes more frequent in more markets, the professional and legal pressure to standardize that assessment will follow the data.
