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.

You can listen to the interview here.

“Hazard mitigation is very important and there’s a lot of value in looking at past events, but we know with climate change that we can’t use the past to project what the future will be like. For example, the flood that a community used to experience every 100 years may now be the 20-year flood.”

Nice Coastal Services Magazine article on Lewes, Delaware, where the city (with help from ICLEI and Delaware Sea Grant) successfully merged climate change adaptation into their hazard mitigation planning. One participant called it a “win-win, no-regrets strategy.” I expect we’ll be seeing a lot efforts like this in the future.

The Bay Citizen reports that while not everybody likes the regulation as passed, it has at least some support from both environmental and development interests. From the Bay Citizen:

“These policies discourage projects that would develop in dumb places, and it encourages tidal marsh restoration in undeveloped areas,” said David Lewis, executive director of the nonprofit Save the Bay.

Sounds like a good start.

You can download a PDF of the exact language passed here.

(Image: ground.zero)

Here’s what FEMA has to say about it:

The 2011 CCM, 4th Ed. (FEMA P-55), is a 2-volume publication that provides a comprehensive approach to planning, siting, designing, constructing, & maintaining homes in the coastal environment. Volume I provides information about hazard identification, siting decisions, regulatory requirements, economic implications, & risk management. The primary audience for Volume I is design professionals, officials, & those involved in the decision-making process. Volume II contains in-depth descriptions of design, construction, & maintenance practices that, when followed, will increase the durability of residential buildings in the harsh coastal environment and reduce economic losses associated with coastal natural disasters. The primary audience for Volume II is the design professional who is familiar with building codes & standards & has a basic understanding of engineering principles.

I haven’t had a chance to read through it yet, but a quick glance shows a number of updated illustrations and photos and some new content. I’m looking forward to reading more as soon as I have a few spare hours or days.

(From Climate Communication)

See the illustration or head over to the site to check it out.

Storm Surge Simulator

Coastal CHARM (Community Health And Resource Management)

You can read more about it on the Texas AgriLife Extension Service site.

[UPDATE] More Videos

(thanks, Heather Wade).

The short version? It’s not looking pretty, and the challenges won’t be confined to coastal areas either. Floodplains are going to grow across across the country, and not just a little.

You can read the full story here.

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).