Planning Ahead for Coastal Resilience

More and more coastal communities face hard evidence that sea level rise (SLR) is far from abstract but is becoming very, very real – as in “water lapping at your doorstep” real. This has pushed them to take steps to keep their communities safe – an effort that has increasingly been referred to as working toward coastal resilience – the ability of an area to lessen risk, protect resources and enhance recovery in the event of a coastal calamity.

How does a community pursue resilience? Here are a few examples:

In response to an opportunity offered in Florida Statutes to create an “adaptation action area” as part of a mandated comprehensive planning effort, communities such as Yankeetown (on the Big Bend area of the Florida coast between Tampa and the Panhandle) has developed a way to approach land use planning that better addresses and accommodates resilience.

It does so by including factors not always engaged in a planning discussion:

• Spatial: Identifying areas whose natural resources are vulnerable to SLR.
• Temporal: Setting a planning horizon that extend 40-100 years – a significant expansion of the usual scope – to allow for SLR’s timetable.
• Inventory: Identifying and ranking resources at risk, both natural (habitat and species) and manmade (structures and infrastructure). This would also ID repetitive loss structures deemed increasingly vulnerable (and thus in need of action).

It then follows with a section on “shoreline transgression,” specifically to address any vegetation or species migration necessitated by SLR through land acquisition and other methods. It also addresses structural adaptation to SLR, either through relocation, removal, shoreline stabilization (soft solutions first, then hard) or modification.

Finally, the plan works to engage both citizens and other governments to both understand and coordinate with resilience planning – a prudent recognition that political will and empathetic outside regulation are crucial to planning for SLR success.

This kind of anticipatory (or at least quickly responsive) approach can be seen around the country:

• Charleston, SC, developed a Sea Level Rise Strategy (which includes a better SLR planning projection) to augment its ongoing efforts to protect the city and its citizens, such as updated building codes to raise structures, drainage improvements to combat flooding driven by rising tides, acquisition of repetitive loss properties and more.
• While the current robust El Niño has underscored the vulnerability of California’s coasts cliffs to undercutting and failure (and has forced a new look at coastal development rules), it also reminded many that fragile coastal resources have a unique challenge there: No place to migrate except up – which is not always an option. This is an issue not only on the open-ocean shoreline, but even more so in more sheltered ecosystems in places such as San Francisco Bay, where unique wetlands face extinction should water levels rise quicker than the ecosystems can adapt (or migrate).
• Superstorm Sandy may have demonstrated the protective value of high dunes and wide beaches to residents, visitors and businesses along the jersey Shore, but a unique winter storm last month revealed the vulnerabilities often on the bay side of the coastal islands there. A combination of storms winds, sustained waves and higher tides wreaked millions of dollars in damages to coastal communities hit by bayside flooding. This has prompted a new study into response to bayside flooding to protect both communities and coastal resources – a task made more difficult by the need to accommodate both economy and ecology (since the bayfronts can include both vital commercial and unique natural resources) without creating more flooding problems in adjacent areas.

Building resilience is challenge in the best environments, as competing interests need to be balanced and different needs be recognized. But in areas as dynamic as our nation’s coasts, making them more resilient to inevitable natural events is a complex task indeed. It’s only through planning and persistence that success is likely to be achieved.