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SEA LEVEL RISE In the Face of Rising Sea Levels, Experts Call for Nationwide Coastal Management Approach Original article: https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/in-the-face-of-rising-sea-levels-experts-call-for-nationwide-coastal-management-approach Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | ||
In the Face of Rising Sea Levels, Experts Call for Nationwide Coastal Management Approach
By Tyler Burkhardt
April 3, 2023
More than 15,000 miles of North American beachfronts could be underwater by the year 2100, and the tools most municipalities and homeowners have at their disposal to respond to coastal erosion are dubiously effective, sometimes counterproductive, and highly regulated.
Most existing permitting ordinances treat individual beaches as many small plots of waterfront real estate rather than one interconnected ecosystem. Reevaluating the Army Corps of Engineers’ Nationwide Permit 13 on bank stabilization, which regulates erosion-prevention activities, could be an important first step to creating a comprehensive national coastal resilience strategy.
Protecting America’s beaches requires strengthening decision makers’ understanding of the risks climate change poses to coastal ecosystems in order to create a unified, science-based permitting strategy across regional, state, and federal regulations.
Despite making up less than 10 percent of landmass in the United States, coastal counties are home to over 128 million people—more than 40 percent of the U.S. population. Moreover, the third National Climate Assessment reports that coastal recreation and tourism accounts for 85 percent of the country’s $700 billion in tourism revenues, which is “the largest and fastest-growing sector of the U.S. service industry.” America’s coastal regions are both critically important and particularly vulnerable to climate impacts, presenting an urgent need for careful analysis of the systems in place to protect them from sea level rise.
Tides on the Rise
The Environmental Law Institute (ELI) and Coastal Flood Resilience Project convened a webinar in early 2023 to discuss the impact of storms and rising seas on American beaches. A panel of scientists, researchers, and environmental lawyers discussed the need for adaptive measures in coastal areas, the pros and cons of such measures, and existing regulatory barriers to taking action. Jeff Peterson, a visiting scholar at ELI and the panel’s moderator, set the stage by outlining the potential for action: “the responses to increasing losses of beaches by government and coastal property owners will influence the health of beaches … [especially as] the population living right along the coast is expected to double by 2060.”
Rising sea levels have already harmed coastal communities, and as climate change progresses, higher seas continue to threaten regions with sandy beaches. For instance, Peterson said, “critically eroded beaches in the state of Florida went from 217 miles [of coastline] in 1989 to over 400 miles last year.” According to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 10,000 to 15,000 miles of North America’s coasts are projected to lose 300 feet of shoreline by 2100, under medium to high greenhouse gas emission scenarios (RCP4.5 to RCP8.5); these processes could affect upwards of 13 million people. While not every person’s home will immediately be washed away, incremental damages remain a real concern—especially because people are generally underinsured against flooding. Moreover, flooding events and submerged infrastructure have been found to exacerbate other issues, like food insecurity.
To respond, coastal communities are increasingly turning to coastal reinforcement and beach preservation strategies. Coastal preservation strategies fall into two main categories: beach nourishment and shoreline armoring, which can be further subcategorized into “soft” and “hard” armoring. Fourteen percent of the U.S. coastline is currently reinforced by external structures like seawalls, or “armored,” and that percentage could double by 2100, which would cost as much as $300 billion.
Because coastal preservation comes in many forms, the benefits and obstacles to implementation differ wildly across strategies. For instance, soft armoring approaches, also known as “living shorelines,” are more eco-friendly but tend to be more difficult to implement. Yet, regulation rarely reflects this nuanced reality—in particular, the ELI webinar highlighted that existing regulations of coastal preservation measures lack a unified federal strategy for shoreline protection. This means that attempts to protect parts of the coastline are often isolated, unsustainable, and sometimes counterproductive.
Beach Nourishment
Beach nourishment—the process of restoring beaches with sand refills from other locations—is expensive and largely ineffective as a long-term solution to beach erosion. The United States has spent more than $11 billion (inflation-adjusted) since 1923 on beach nourishment programs, according to a Western Carolina University database. In the short term, these programs do have their advantages: the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association reports that the federal government generates $230 in tourism taxes for every dollar spent on nourishment programs. However, Sean Vitousek, a research oceanographer with the U.S. Geological Survey, explained during the webinar that as sea levels rise, processes like longshore transport—the ocean’s natural conveyer-belt, which moves sediment along coasts—will simply continue to remove sand from the area, even as more is deposited.
Some environmental organizations have begun to actively push back against taxpayer-sponsored beach nourishment projects because of their unsustainability. For instance, when the New Jersey legislature introduced bill A-639 to double state funding for the Shore Protection Fund in 2021, the state chapter of The Sierra Club led opposition efforts to the legislation, which did not make it to a vote. Due to its tourism-linked economic benefits, the current federal budget for beach replenishment is unlikely to be cut in the near future. Nonetheless, it is clear that like filling a leaky bathtub, adding more sand to at-risk beaches does nothing to address the fundamental issue of rising sea levels. A long-term strategy for protecting American coastlines requires more permanent solutions.
Hard Armoring
In pursuit of permanence, many at-risk property owners seeking to protect their real estate from sea level rise turn to engineered structures that physically block wave erosion, such as seawalls, bulkheads, and ripraps (layers of stone used to protect surfaces). Because nearly any developer can pour concrete, hard armoring is relatively easy to implement when the sole priority is to protect specific structures or plots of land—making this type of armoring an appealing choice. However, these forms of “hard” protection tend to worsen erosion at the periphery of the reinforcing structures.
Charles Lester, director of the Ocean and Coastal Policy Center in the Marine Science Institute at the University of California Santa Barbara, explained during the ELI webinar that hard armoring risks creating “bathtub” effects: places where one isolated parcel of reinforced land stands strong, while the surrounding coastline retreats on both sides.
A study of 65 beaches in the Puget Sound of Washington State showed that not only is hard armoring “consistently associated” with reductions in beach width and biodiversity, but that the impacts of individual projects can be cumulative. Because beach sediment is constantly being both eroded and re-deposited, sufficiently high numbers of armoring projects on a region’s coastline can fundamentally change the kinds of sediment found on nearby beaches. Meanwhile, case studies abound revealing the unintended consequences of isolated hard armoring projects, such as the damage caused to Santa Barbara’s Goleta Beach when a rock abatement was created to protect the parking lot. For these reasons, some communities are starting to replace their coastline structures with more natural methods of reinforcement.
Coastal_armoring_sea_wall.jpg Coastal_armoring_no_sea_wall.jpg
Reducing the footprint of armoring in front of the Half Moon Bay Ritz Carlton increased the total beach area. Copyright (C) 2002-2023, Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, www.Californiacoastline.org.
Soft Armoring
Softer armoring approaches frequently substitute plant matter, sand, and oyster beds for the hard armoring structures of engineered concrete and steel. These soft armoring approaches are substantially less harmful to the coastline ecosystem. Often called “living shorelines,” these initiatives are known to be effective methods of adapting to climate change, but they have been and continue to be widely underutilized, according to the National Wildlife Federation.
During the ELI webinar on managing the threats of rising sea levels to American beaches and coastal areas, experts cited permitting reform as one of the main hurdles to future implementation of soft armoring. As it stands, most municipal coastal building codes are designed with hard armoring in mind—meaning that permits for living shorelines can be more complicated to obtain in the existing regulatory landscape.
One of the major obstacles to more uniform and sustainable implementation of beach armoring lies in the often-outdated permitting regulations that govern who can build coastline structures, what kinds are eligible for construction, and where they can be built.
Permitting Problems
Travis Brandon, associate professor at the Belmont College of Law, addressed the question of counterproductive permitting regulations during the webinar. He identified two key inefficiencies in the permitting policies governing shoreline protection: a mismatch between federal and state objectives, reflected in non-uniform permitting strategies, and the outdated nature of the Army Corps of Engineers’ Nationwide Permit 13 on bank stabilization, which regulates erosion-prevention activities. This policy allows permitholders to conduct coastal bank stabilization activities of no more than 500 feet.
The problem with Permit 13 and related state statutes, Brandon explained, is that none of them operate in the context of a big-picture strategy to protect beaches. Rather, these permitting regulations treat individual beaches as many small plots of waterfront real estate, rather than one interconnected ecosystem. At a broader scale, states have wildly different assessments of what constitutes an imperiled shoreline. Consequently, efforts to reinforce a continuous stretch of coastline could require dozens of permits and a wildly inefficient parcel-by-parcel approach. More often than not, these permitting requirements incentivize the creation of isolated structures that worsen erosion under the bathtub effect.
While some state regulations are stricter than Permit 13, it is the default process governing coastal bank stabilization in many parts of the country. This is especially true in the vulnerable Southeast, where as many as 2.2 million people—including at least 370,000 Black or economically disadvantaged individuals—will experience the consequences of sea level rise, including flooding, temporary isolation, and even forced migration, by the year 2100.
To adequately address the threat of rising sea levels, states and the federal government need to work together to create cohesive regional strategies for coastline management, then revise permitting policy accordingly. “The only way that we’re going to get to long-term, sensible beach planning is through federal intervention,” Brandon said. In the short term, he suggested repealing or reforming Permit 13 would be the most significant step in the right direction.
All Hands on Deck
While a timeline for Permit 13 reform remains uncertain, there are a few other avenues to incrementally improve the state of shoreline resilience and protect America’s vulnerable beaches. States can follow Virginia’s lead and incentivize municipalities and coastal homeowners to consider more sustainable, living-shoreline approaches as an alternative to hard armoring going forward. Alongside these regionally-led initiatives, the National Coastal Resilience Fund must effectively direct the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s (PL-117.58) $492 million allocation for natural infrastructure projects to protect coastal communities. Lastly, increases to federal funding for Army Corps of Engineers projects in regional coastal resilience, like those proposed in President Biden’s budget for fiscal year 2024, could go a long way toward creating the amount of infrastructure that will be needed to address the consequences of sea level rise in the United States.
To learn more about the science of coastal erosion, the challenges of rising sea levels, and possible policy responses, check out the ELI webinar and EESI’s coastal resilience Congressional briefings, as well as the report A Resilient Future for Coastal Communities: Federal Policy Recommendations from Solutions in Practice.
Author: Tyler Burkhardt
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| The text being discussed is available at | https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/in-the-face-of-rising-sea-levels-experts-call-for-nationwide-coastal-management-approach and |