Community resilience capacities (i.e., social capital, networks, learning, leadership, collective self-efficacy) and ecosystem health are both crucial for coastal adaptations to climate change. Enabling capacities for both people and nature with targeted initiatives requires clever social and institutional designs that go beyond the typical benefits put forward by nature-based solution initiatives. The SocialByNature project examines the scalability of nature-based solutions on tropical coasts to enable deeper social co-benefits through science-based institutional design, while also co-reinforcing the efficacy of reviving and managing nature on the coast based on place-based cultural relations to risk and nature.