My role in the future will be to assist in the development of, and advocate for, flood management projects. This will be done by distilling the complex factors that determine the effectiveness of a potential solution so funding can be secured. I will also balance the design considerations between resiliency, cost-effectiveness, and ecological impacts for the projects that I work on. Securing funding will be the most challenging task to reduce the impacts of flood events. The severity of flood events will continue to increase. Much of the layout of our towns and cities have been established by the practices of the past and many prove to fail or be insufficient for modern events. Some communities with substantial tax bases will have the means to repair and replace aging infrastructure with resilient solutions. Many more communities are unable to foot the bill for these critical infrastructure projects and thus their property and lives are increasingly at risk. All communities from rich to poor deserve to have safe and effective infrastructure to ensure their needs are met. These projects must be resilient, but determining how resilient is often another dilemma. Data collection and analysis can be done to determine what has occurred in the past, yet the conditions of the future remain nebulous as the climate crisis produces more intense storms. Standards are set and used by municipal authorities to create minimum requirements, but these are often based on assumptions that can prove to be fallible or outdated. Then plans to create infrastructure that goes beyond the minimum standards are met with apprehension from stakeholders with concerns about the funding being wasted. The benefits of well-designed and well-constructed infrastructure often are not felt until extreme conditions are faced and survived. Projects also have a history of creating unintended complications with their surrounding communities and ecosystems. Most practices in the past aimed to convey water away from a location as quickly as possible but this strategy views rainwater as a waste instead of a necessary resource. Future practices must include ways to integrate, and store captured water to utilize for non-potable uses or recharge groundwater and accelerate natural processes. The complexity of controlling flood events means that a single project is unlikely to ensure communities are safe. Infrastructure projects cannot be thought of as fixing a problem but instead as improving a part of the larger system. This difference in thought shifts the focus to create the goal of not only a solution that works but a solution that improves. The future is set to challenge the status quo of the practices that the past has left us. However, this also provides the next generation of engineers and scientists with a breadth of problems to improve upon just as the previous generation felt about their solutions. With today’s advances in technology, the solutions created today can consider more factors to find a balance between a project’s resiliency, cost-effectiveness, and ecological impacts to create solutions that future generations deserve.