‘Living shoreline’ might have been the most repeated phrase Friday morning in Miami’s city hall, where a panel of experts reviewed plans to protect the city’s coast from sea level rise.

They gave the city high marks for its efforts so far, including allowing extra tall first floors to allow for future elevation, but said Miami needs to focus more on the riverfront and come up with a master plan for all waterfront development. Not to mention figure out how to pay for potentially expensive projects. One politically touchy option the experts floated: A special tax on waterfront residents and businesses.

But panelists kept bringing up the need for more “living” shorelines — when a concrete sea wall is bolstered with plants like mangroves and native grasses, which break up thrashing waves, soak up floodwaters and even make the water cleaner.

Miami and the Downtown Development Authority paid about $130,000 for the analysis by an expert team from the Urban Land Institute, which spent a week examining the city’s vulnerable spots and interviewing relevant people before presenting their findings Friday. They looked at parks, street ends and the baywalk and considered solutions for the looming threat of sea level rise.

And it’s coming soon. By 2045, surging seas could put more than 13,000 people — and $37 million in property taxes — at risk in the Magic City alone, according to calculations by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Much of that risk is, naturally, clustered along the waterfront, which is home to skyscrapers full of people paying high rents to live near Biscayne Bay. The city’s original vision to have a continuous public space between the water and the condos is now seen as a new opportunity to protect Miami from the sea.

“It’s not just a jogging path. It’s our front line defense for sea rise and storm surge,” said Miami Commissioner Ken Russell, whose narrow district covers the city’s bayfront. “It’s the divide between the water and the people and it’s the convergence point as well.”

The ULI experts gave a thumbs up to the draft ideas for the city’s baywalk, including living shorelines and porous pavement. Neal Schafers, from the DDA, said consultants plan to hand over their drafts to city staff “any day now,” where they’ll undergo final tweaks before heading to the city commission.

But it’s unclear just how feasible the new ideas are.

One of the ULI panelists, Susannah Ross, a landscape architect from Boston, said she heard in interviews that the main obstacle was permitting with the county because of environmental concerns like seagrass dieoff and loss of manatee habitat.

“They’re not being considered as regulations because there’s an understanding that the Department of Environmental Resources Management won’t approve anything that goes into the water,” she said. “It’s a shame to us that it’s environmental concerns coming up against other environmental concerns. We’re getting nowhere.”

DERM Director Lee Hefty clarified the department supports living shorelines, but said many of the suggested projects they’ve had issues with want to expand the shoreline into the bay rather than take up part of the existing real estate.

“The county — and DERM in particular — are very supportive of living shorelines projects. We’ve built a number of them ourselves,” he said. “The bay should be reserved for things that are part of the bay. We’re not promoting anymore dredging and filling into the bay.”