It seems to me….
“I have long understood that climate change is not only an environmental issue – it is a humanitarian, economic, health, and justice issue as well.” ~ Frances Beinecke[1].
There are many areas where it now is generally accepted which never should been developed. These include barrier islands along the East and Gulf Coasts, Mississippi River floodplains, and many other locations such as on earthquake faults, or areas vulnerable to wildfires, avalanches, landslides, etc. Most of these locations are historically considered to be high-risk and prone to environmental damage. Unfortunately, threats present in these areas were not adequately understood when development was originally permitted.
A barrier island is a long, thin, sandy stretch of land, oriented parallel to a mainland coast that protects the coast from the full force of powerful storm waves. Between the barrier island and the mainland is a calm, protected water body such as a lagoon or bay. Barrier islands are dynamic systems, constantly moving, migrating under the influence of changing sea levels, storms, waves, tides, and longshore currents. In the U.S., barrier islands occur primarily along the Gulf and Atlantic Coast where gently sloping sandy coastlines exist as opposed to rocky coastlines and sharp drop-offs along the West Coast.
Floodplains are natural flooding outlets for rivers. They in general are a flat area of land next to a river or stream which stretches from the banks of the river to the outer edges of the valley. Floodways sometimes are seasonal so that the channel is dry for part of the year.
Floodplain habitation has occurred throughout history, notably due to associated economic benefits for a number of activities such as trade and agriculture. People, agriculture, and businesses on floodplains are always at some risk and population growth in high-risk areas has often resulted in extensive damages and fatalities. Now, areas which have had repeated major flooding are taking steps to move development away from their river edges and restore the water’s natural paths.
Floodplain restoration is the process of returning a floodplain to its original condition prior to when people modified the landscape for development or agriculture. Restoration may include removing dikes and levees, as well as flooding previously drained marshes and swamps.
When it comes to the unsustainable development of barrier islands along the U.S. coastline, New Jersey was one of the first and remains one of the worst examples[2]. It has a tempestuous beach environment mostly avoided until industrial times when it was rebranded as a summer vacationland. Atlantic City[3] and Cape May became tourist destinations by the mid-1800s when people began to escape the heat and infectious diseases of Philadelphia. Native Americans, primarily the Lenape people, had long seasonally migrated to the shore during summers but came to fish, not to cover the sand with hotels and boardwalks. Developers and residents quickly learned beach areas were able to quickly change following storms; New Jersey was the first state to try to control coastal sediment flows by erecting seawalls, jetties, and bulkheads to such an extent that virtually none of its coastline now remains untouched by human intervention.
As global-warming related flooding worsens, a few massive seawalls will likely be built to protect densely populated economic centers such as lower Manhattan. But there is only so much money and time for concrete enclosures. Residents in places such as Tangier Island in Virginia, Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, and globally from Bangladesh to the Maldives to Senegal are coping with the same reality as the coastline inhabitants of New Jersey: a wall will not be built to save them – and flooding is already occurring.
Few viable long-term options exist for these high-risk areas. Some property owners in these areas have repeatedly experienced property damage or destruction only to rebuild in the same location using property insurance. It is becoming generally acknowledged that nature will eventually win this battle; the only remaining question is how this acquiescence can be acceptably facilitated. It is unfortunate that at the behest of primarily wealthy and politically well-connected property owners, the government interceded to guarantee a safety net for property owners in high-risk areas likely to be denied property insurance.
Insurers do not want to insure property for people likely to submit claims and therefore tend to avoid people living in high-risk homes or situations. There are many different situations considered to be high-risk where a certain hazard is much more likely to occur consequently necessitating property owners to purchase high-risk homeowner’s insurance. Without the availability of such policies, few property owners would ever consider living in those areas permitting the property to return to its predevelopment state.
A variety of programs across the country provide insurance for owners of high-risk properties experiencing difficulty obtaining coverage in the standard market. In addition to properties in areas subject to environmental risk, insurance companies might refuse to insure properties in high-crime areas, areas frequently experiencing severe weather, or if the property has old plumbing, electrical, or heating systems.
In the late 1960s after three years of rioting devastated neighborhoods in large cities, insurance companies paid all claims but threatened to terminate future coverage for property owners in those areas. Congress responded to complaints in 1968 by passing a law creating FAIR (Fair Access to Insurance Requirements) plans authorizing states to establish subsidized plans to assure that property owners in urban and coastal areas could obtain coverage. As a direct result of FAIR plans, property owners were able to rebuild after repeatedly experiencing property damage or destruction with little incentive to relocate.
Some areas, especially coastal communities prone to repeated flooding and attempting to adapt to climate change, are beginning to consider what was once unthinkable: retreat. A program called Blue Acres permits the government to “buy out” repeatedly flooded property at its pre-storm values instead of paying to once again repair or rebuild it. Demolition crews demolish and remove any indication of human habitation, the deed is transferred to the state, and redevelopment is forever blocked[4].
To emergency responders, retreat is a form of flood mitigation. To environmental advocates, it’s ecological restoration. To resilience planners, it’s adaptation to climate change. Environmental activists had to acknowledge they no longer could fixate solely on the problem of carbon emissions.
The complexity and ambivalence of retreat serves as a reminder that there are no easy solutions and that it is not possible to rebuild forever or to wall communities off from the problems they face. Retreat signals not just the physical movement of recalibrating to the tides but an existential reckoning with the necessity of living in environmentally threatened areas. The word itself is borrowed from the language of geologic processes, which humans have undeniably hastened. As glaciers and beaches retreat, so too must development.
The U.S. has occasionally experimented with the policy of retreat on a very small scale by offering voluntary buyouts to property owners threatened by rising sea-levels. The outcome has rarely been promising. Buyouts are extremely expensive, extremely disruptive, and many of the attempts have not gone well invoking fear among citizens in every political stratum bringing to mind land grabs, racist resettlement projects, class warfare, and, depending on one’s ideology, either federal overreach or federal abandonment.
Because they require coordination among politicians, homeowners, lawyers, engineers, banks, insurers, and all levels of government, they are enormously complicated to execute, even poorly. At their worst, buyouts break up community support systems, entrench inequality, and leave a checkerboard of blighted lots in their wake. At their best, they avoid these negatives but still displace people from their homes.
Regardless of how much and how quickly humans reduce greenhouse gas emissions, climate change is already producing effects that cannot be reversed. Within a few decades, as saltwater begins to regularly block roads, kill wetlands, disrupt power supplies, bury popular beaches, undermine houses, and turn common rainstorms into perilous floods, the most vulnerable pockets of coastal towns will become uninhabitable.
Models scientists have made to predict the influence of sea-level rise on future floods have become highly sophisticated combining global factors such as the thermal expansion of the seas with local variables such as land subsidence and variations in the gravitational pull of land on the ocean around it but major uncertainties remain. For one thing, it is unknown how quickly and severely societies will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For the next few decades certain effects will occur regardless of how much climate change is mitigated.
While it would be politically unpopular and likely to encounter opposition, the subsidized portion of FAIR insurance programs should gradually be phased out requiring property owners to pay the full cost of high-risk insurance. This, along with voluntary buyouts, would provide encouragement for owners to relocate so threatened property could be returned to its original ecological state.
That’s what I think, what about you?
[1] Frances Beinecke is the former president of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
[2] Schwartz, Jen. Surrendering to Rising Seas, Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/surrendering-to-rising-seas/, 1 August 2018. Several sections have been taken from this article.
[3] Disclosure: I was born in Atlantic City, NJ.
[4] Schwartz, Jen. Surrendering to Rising Seas, Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/surrendering-to-rising-seas/, 1 August 2018.
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