The question facing at least eight local, state and federal agencies boils down to this: With California officials expecting climate change to raise sea levels here by 14 inches by 2050, should herculean efforts be made to preserve the beach, the pipe and the plant, or should the community simply bow to nature?

“Both Coasts Watch Closely as San Francisco Faces Erosion” in the New York Times.

The Center for Planning Excellence (CPEX) and the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) recently released the Best Practices Manual for Development in Coastal Louisiana website.

What’s novel about this site is that it provides strategies for creating sustainable and resilient coastal communities based on “geotypes” (pick from chenier plain, alluvium, upper riverbanks, middle riverbanks, lower riverbanks, or coastal delta: map for where these are in Louisiana here).

While the geotypes aren’t found everywhere, many of the recommendations on the site are relevant not only for other parts of the Gulf of Mexico, but for coastal areas around the country. Definitely worth a look.

Best Practices Manual for Development in Coastal Louisiana website.

We are pleased to announce the release of the first edition of the National Preparedness Goal, which is available for download at http://www.fema.gov/PPD8. The National Preparedness Goal is the first deliverable called for by Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 8 and was signed by the Secretary of Homeland Security on September 23, 2011.

The National Preparedness Goal sets the vision for preparedness nationwide and identifies the core capabilities and capability targets necessary to achieve that vision across the five mission areas: prevention, protection, mitigation, response and recovery.

The first edition of the National Preparedness Goal builds extensively on prior work of various stakeholder groups from around the nation, draws upon lessons learned from past large-scale and catastrophic events and represents input from preparedness partners from all levels of government, non-profit organizations, the private sector and individuals. The input and ideas developed through working groups, outreach sessions, targeted engagement efforts and a two-week national review period was critical to shaping this document.

As one reader pointed out, “Proof is in the pudding of course, but at least this piece includes mitigation — with community resilience called out as a [desired] core capability.”

Here’s to hoping that words lead to action.

Unfortunately, nobody has found a silver bullet to save coastal development from future sea levels (yet). Worse, if you spend any time researching the most popular adaptation options, you’ll quickly realize that they tend to be incredibly expensive for somebody (property owners, tax payers, or both) AND they’re, at best, stopgap measures. Sea walls? We’ve all seen impermanent they are, the problems they cause, and how expensive they are to repair when they start to fail. Beach nourishment? Super pricey, and even if you could somehow secure an endless source of funding, we’re running out of usable sand in many parts of the country. So many of these techniques feel a little like kicking the can down the road, and aren’t even possible short-term solutions for areas without substantial economic resources.

The EPA’s Climate Ready Estuaries Program has just released an interesting and fairly in-depth report on one method that could help comprehensively address the country’s changing climate: rolling easements.

When a community or state adopts rolling easements, it embraces or at least accepts the fact that some low-lying coastal areas are going to either be eroded away or inundated by rising seas. Property owners in these areas are allowed to use their property as they wish (within regular guidelines, of course), but are NOT allowed to stop the advance of the sea, and must remove structures and infrastructure as areas submerge.

Rolling Easements (PDF), provides a good overview of specific ways that communities can begin to implement or at least consider using rolling easements.

Chapters include:

• What can a rolling easement accomplish?
• Legal approaches to creating a rolling easement
• Choosing the approach: is there legal authority
• Advantages and disadvantages of rolling easements
• Defining how it will work
• Defining where to apply the rolling easement
• Managing the rolling easement
• The endgame: managing the transition

Definitely worth a look. This isn’t an easy solution, and it’s not going to make everybody happy. But if we had easy solutions that would make everybody happy, we’d have implemented them by now.

Rolling Easements, by the EPA’s Climate Ready Estuaries Program (via John Bowie).

If you only have a moment, start with the Climate Ready Water Utilities Toolbox. I know—another toolkit. But the EPA has taken an interesting strategy to address the primary challenge of toolkits: they’re either too small to be very useful, or they’re too large to find what you’re looking for.

What the EPA has done (or is working on, since the site still says “beta version” right up top), is created a clever, four-step way to narrow down what you might be looking for, and then get it to you. Check out this illustration:

Each of the numbers you see corresponds to a general question:

1. Which category of items would you like to search (activities, funding, publications, tools, workshops)?
2. What sort of utility do you represent and where is it?
3. What are your concerns about it related to climate change?
4. What sort of action are you interesting in taking/learning about?

Once you’ve made your selections, you hit “Submit Results” and it gives you a table with links. Useful, and definitely worth a look.

There’s more on the site, too.

CREAT

In their words (since I haven’t had a chance to download and play with it yet):

EPA has developed Climate Resilience Evaluation & Awareness Tool (CREAT), a software tool to assist drinking water and wastewater utility owners and operators in understanding potential climate change threats and in assessing the related risks at their individual utilities. CREAT provides users with access to the most recent national assessment of climate change impacts for use in considering how these changes will impact utility operations and missions.

CREAT allows users to evaluate potential impacts of climate change on their utility and to evaluate adaptation options to address these impacts using both traditional risk assessment and scenario-based decision making. CREAT provides libraries of drinking water and wastewater utility assets (e.g., water resources, treatment plants, pump stations) that could be impacted by climate change, possible climate change-related threats (e.g., flooding, drought, water quality), and adaptive measures that can be implemented to reduce the impacts of climate change. The tool guides users through identifying threats based on regional differences in climate change projections and designing adaptation plans based on the types of threats being considered. Following assessment, CREAT provides a series of risk reduction and cost reports that will allow the user to evaluate various adaptation options as part of long-term planning.

Sounds promising (and could be a useful part of figuring out which of your communities utilities are most at risk). You’ll need to download CREAT here to test it out.

Finally, the EPA has updated their “Tabletop Exercise Tool for Water Systems” to include climate change scenarios. Each exercise comes with a situation manual, PowerPoint presentation, and more.

This looks like a very promising set for those working on water utilities.

He acknowledges that predicting the effects of sea level rise on beaches is complex, and that results will vary greatly depending on many factors. But overall, the picture isn’t pretty.

It seems likely that the cities will be where the world’s national treasure will be expended and the remaining shorefront communities will face eventual abandonment. For the sake of the beaches we can only hope that a real retreat policy will be instituted and as communities are abandoned, their buildings will be demolished and removed. Otherwise we can expect that within 40 to 60 years, the world’s beaches will begin to be lined with debris from abandoned and deteriorating buildings providing much hazardous material to pollute the oceans.

If our beaches are to survive for our grandchildren’s enjoyment, the time has come to plan the big withdrawal.

Worth a read (or a look: the photos are great, though troubling).

“Sea Level Rise and the World’s Beaches“

Among the benefits:

• Stabilizes the upland
• Protects infrastructure
• Maintains property values for some

. . . And the detriments:

• Source sediment impoundment resulting in increased erosion of the fronting and adjacent beach due to Sediment budget reduction
• Passive erosion resulting in the eventual loss of the dry beach and possibly the loss of the inter-tidal area along eroding shores
• Loss of lateral beach access
• Loss or changes to marine habitat
• Reduction of and possible loss of marine organisms and associated ecological functions
• Adjacent property impacts, such as end scour or flanking erosion and,
• Placement loss resulting in the direct loss of beach and possibly habitat

In the end, the author concludes that site-specific conditions must be taken into consideration when exploring the idea of using structures to protect land:

Identifying the potential impacts of coastal armoring on a site- or littoral-cell specific basis is critical in assisting coastal managers with decisions on whether to permit coastal armoring, to suggest alterations that may have less impact, or to assist in developing mitigation techniques for potential adverse impacts, if possible or feasible.
Shoreline and beach management plans identifying areas that should be preserved for their unique natural and beneficial functions, such as important sediment sources to adjacent beaches, dunes and barrier beaches, or beaches of economic importance, are vital to the preservation of coastal community character, and maintain a viable economic base.

For more on structural mitigation, see “Flood and Erosion Control Structures“.

“Shoreline Armoring Impacts and Management Along the Shores of Massachusetts and Kauai, Hawaii,” by James F. O’Connell (PDF).

“We thought we could engineer and control nature by these techniques, but you’re fighting a losing battle,” [Rick Murray of Scituate, MA] said. “And the conservation of energy and mass (of waves hitting a sea wall) ends up accelerating erosion.”

This isn’t new news, but it’s worth considering if your community has (or is considering building) any seawalls or other protective structures. Also worth noting is that, as the article points out, climate change will only make things worse.

“Sea walls may do more harm than good,” The Patriot Ledger.

Image: Elsie esq.

“Front-Line City in Virginia Tackles Rise in Sea“.

The next block of these (free) webcasts starts on November 18, 2010. Organizers promise that by the end of the series, participants will know specific actions they can take to build support for adaptation and increase community resilience. Here’s their overview of the programs:

November 18, 2010, 2:00-3:30 PM (EST): Climate Impacts and Risk
Communication
The first webcast in this series will provide an introduction to
adaptation by covering the impacts of climate change across different
regions of the United States; the risk presented by these impacts; how
climate adaptation differs from climate mitigation; and approaches to
engaging various stakeholder groups—regardless of attitudes to climate
change—and effectively communicating risk to build support for
adaptation efforts in the common interest. A representative from a local
government will discuss their experience working successfully with a
range of stakeholders to promote adaptation within the community. To
register for this webcast, visit: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/289508083. Please note that the
audio portion of this webcast will only be available by dialing into a
toll-free conference call.

December 2010: Adaptation Planning and Implementation
The second session of this webcast mini-series will focus on frameworks
that state and local governments can use to assess vulnerability to
climate change, develop adaption action plans, and implement adaption
strategies for building resilience.

January 2011: Federal Resources and Support for Climate Change
Adaptation
The third webcast in this series will discuss the role of the federal
government in promoting adaptation to climate change in the United
States.

Sounds like something worth keeping an eye on: we’ve added it to the StormSmart Coasts Calendar.

For more information head over to the series website.

Thanks to John Bowie for sharing this.

Image: LuMaxArt Linkware (with EPA logo added)