HomeMy WebLinkAboutBack-up - Article5/1/2015 From Risk to Resilience: Preparing U.S. Coasts for Climate Change I Center for American Progress
ilea Progress
From Risk to Resilience: Preparing U.S. Coasts
for Climate Change
SOURCE: AP/Kathy Willens
Members of the New York National Guard walk past a home destroyed by Superstorm
Sandy in the Rockaways section of the Queens Borough of New York in January 2013.
By Shiva Polefka & Michael Conathan
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Thursday, April 30, 2015
See related event: From Risk to Resilience: Fortifying U.S. Communities in the Face of
Climate Change
America's coastal cities are global centers of innovation, output, employment, and
trade. The communities built around the country's beaches and working harbors
capitalize on marine natural resources to promote fishing, tourism, aquaculture, and
other industries. As a result, America's coastal counties produce nearly half of U.S.
economic output while taking up less than 10 percent of its land area. And they
continue to grow faster in population than the nation as a whole. Put simply, America's
coasts are a pillar of success and vitality for the entire nation.
Yet even as population and production continue to concentrate along U.S. coasts,
overwhelming physical evidence shows that coastal counties sit squarely in the
destructive path of climate change. Intensifying storms, accelerating sea -level rise,
chronic "nuisance" flooding, and the intrusion of saltwater into aquifers and
wastewater infrastructure are all prime examples of the impacts already beginning to
undermine the attributes that make America's coasts special. Scientists say that these
impacts will only worsen during the century ahead.
Policymakers at all levels of government must chart a safer course for U.S. coastal cities
and towns to make them resilient to these new hazards. Proposed policies should not
only to enable coastal communities to bounce back from extreme events with
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minimum economic and social disruption, but also accommodate continued population
growth and restore coastal ecosystems to maximize their value and functionality. This
will mean significant —and, at times, politically unpopular —investments in better,
stronger, and more environmentally benign infrastructure, and coastal land -use
reforms that will avert greater costs and loss of life in the years to come. Achieving
resilience will also require a new approach to flood control that looks to nature, in
tandem with steel and concrete, to fortify the nation's coasts while keeping them
clean, livable, and productive.
Resolute policymaking to overcome these challenges will help sustain the economic
dynamism of the nation's coasts in the face of climate change, while reversing coastal
ecosystem declines, fostering new enterprises and exportable innovations in
infrastructure design and construction, and boosting coastal property values and
private -sector investment.
Investing in infrastructure and insight
Research has shown that shoring up infrastructure in the face of climate -driven hazards
will require tens of billions of dollars in investments to strengthen the nation's
transportation, water, and energy systems. Fortunately, preparing for future hazards
comes with a big payoff. Research from the Federal Emergency Management Agency,
or FEMA, has shown that every dollar spent on prehazard mitigation measures for
insured real estate averts $4 in post -disaster recovery costs. Cost -benefit analysis has
also found that every dollar invested in modernizing U.S. public water infrastructure
and shoring up its vulnerabilities to climate change impacts stimulates $6.35 in private -
sector output over the long term.
In order to best focus these investments, policymakers also need to better understand
the specific geographic areas that face the greatest risk. This means funding additional
oceanic and atmospheric monitoring and analysis capabilities to help reduce
uncertainties in existing modeling, and to increase their predictive power. Providing
the public with more accurate, localized, and actionable forecasts for weather and sea
level would lead to better decisions about coastal development and infrastructure and
help investors and property owners allocate capital more efficiently for everything
from building power plants to buying homes.
Reducing risk by getting out of harm's way
Even as sea -level rise accelerates and advances toward projections of 1 foot to 4 feet of
additional rise by 2100, federal land -use policy continues to incentivize some coastal
property owners to live in the expanding flood hazard zones by subsidizing the
ballooning costs of living in harm's way. The federal National Flood Insurance Program,
or NFIP, provides insurance to coastal property owners at rates well below actuarial
soundness, essentially underpricing the risk that owners face. As a result, the
combination of record -breaking storms —from Hurricane Katrina to Superstorm Sandy
—and continued overdevelopment of coastal lands have left the program $23 billion in
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debt to the U.S. Treasury and have earned the NFIP a spot on the U.S. Government
Accountability Office's "High -Risk List" for 2015. Today, American taxpayers continue
to backstop $527 billion in NFIP-covered coastal flood liability, with no relief in sight. As
sea -level rise continues, the number of coastal properties that NFIP insures is predicted
to grow by 130 percent by 2100.
One method that has proven successful in the aftermath of flood disasters is for FEMA
to support states in the purchase of damaged properties, rather than paying for their
reconstruction through NFIP. These programs pay homeowners the full, pre -storm
market price for flood -stricken houses should they voluntarily choose to sell. The state
then restores the underlying lands to their undeveloped condition to serve as parkland
and natural buffer zones for future floods. Extensive data from FEMA and other
researchers show that these property buyouts typically pay for themselves within a
decade through the aversion of future NFIP payouts and other publicly funded flood
response costs. While the social impacts of property buyouts can and must be
mitigated, particularly for lower -income residents, the present and future dangers
posed by sea -level rise make inaction untenable. Innovative, decisive policies —such as
the expansion of FEMA's buyout program —that guide coastal development away from
rising seas are essential components of coastal resilience in the 21st century.
Working with nature
Coastal ecosystems also are a key component of coastal resilience. Oyster and coral
reefs and kelp forests absorb wave energy; mangroves and salt marshes soak up
floodwaters; and coastal forests provide a landward lee from the lashing winds of
hurricanes and other oceanic storms. As ecologists and economists have begun to
survey patterns of hurricane damage and land use, they have uncovered evidence of
billions of dollars in averted losses in places buffered by the presence of healthy coastal
ecosystems.
Unlike concrete seawalls and steel floodgates, coastal ecosystems provide a vast
wealth of other goods and services to coastal economies, including nursery habitat for
commercially valuable fish and shellfish species, pollution filtration, and opportunities
for tourism and recreation. Coastal ecosystems even capture and store vast amounts of
carbon dioxide, meaning that they help mitigate climate change even as they provide
one of the best and most cost effective tools for adapting to its destructive impacts.
And although both built and natural disaster -mitigation methods require high upfront
investments, ecosystems function better and increase in value over time while built
infrastructure begins to depreciate the day that construction is completed.
In the months and years since Superstorm Sandy, engineers and ecologists have begun
to collaborate via state and federal Sandy recovery programs on hybrid coastal
resilience infrastructure. In these projects, ecological features, such as oyster reefs or
marshlands, are integrated into traditional constructed solutions, such as seawalls and
levees. These approaches marry the predictability of engineered storm protection
measures with delivery of some of coastal ecosystems' valuable societal benefits —all
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at a lower cost than standard built infrastructure on its own.
Conclusion: Leaving our coasts better than we found them
As the reality of climate change begins to take root among political leaders from town
councils to the White House, the concept of resilience is becoming the nation's most
concise articulation of how to respond to its present and future impacts. Along
America's coasts, resilience efforts must address diverse challenges that range from
lessening the toll of the next Sandy -like superstorm or hurricane, to daily management
of tides that crest slightly higher every year. They must also account for inevitable
coastal population growth, and yet also reverse the widespread environmental
degradation that has traditionally accompanied coastal urbanization. Solving this
multidimensional problem is a tall order: Coastal ecosystems, towns, and cities face
hazards wrought by more than a century of runaway industrial carbon pollution.
Making these communities more durable will not be easy —and the short term costs
will not be palatable —but as recent disaster expenditures have proven, the cost of
inaction will be much greater.
Past failures to address climate change and other environmental problems now
threaten the essential, distinguishing attributes of coastal communities of all sizes.
With strategic investments and hardnosed leadership, however, Americans can not
only help meet these challenges but also leave our coastal regions even better than we
found them.
Shiva Polefka is a Policy Analyst for the Ocean Policy program at the Center for
American Progress. Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy at the Center.
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