Costal resilienceDebate in North Carolina over sea-level rise continues
Climate change skeptics in the North Carolina legislature revised the forecast horizon of the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission (CRC), a panel of scientific and engineering experts set up by the state government to advised state agencies on coastal issues, from ninety years to thirty years. Infrastructure experts said limiting forecasts to thirty years does not make sense because large infrastructure projects are designed to last at least two or three times that, and hence must take into account conditions which will likely prevail well into the future. Local communities in the state say that since, in their own infrastructure planning, they are not bound by arbitrary limits imposed on state agencies by the legislature, they take a longer view of emerging coastal hazards – and plan accordingly.
The debate in North Carolina over what steps the state and localities should take to cope with sea-level rise has not subsided.
As Aljazeera America reports, the Republican majority, which has controlled the state House and Senate in recent years abolished or weakened several environmental policy boards, including the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission (CRC), a panel of scientific and engineering experts set up to advised state agencies on coastal issues.
The legislature also ordered revising the commission’s sea-level rise report so that it only looked thirty years into the future instead of the original mandate to make forecasts for the next ninety years. Critics of the legislature-imposed time limits and infrastructure experts said limiting forecasts to thirty years does not make sense because large infrastructure projects are designed to last at least two or three times that, and hence must take into account conditions which will likely prevail well into the future.
Infrastructure experts say that the shorter time frame mandated by the legislature may cost the state billions: if a bridge or a highway or a subdivision or a shopping mall must be moved or rebuilt or fortified in thirty years because state planners were not allowed to take into account the likely conditions which will prevail in, say, the thirty-fifth year, then the state will find itself investing a lot of money which otherwise would not have had to be spent.
“Local officials may breathe easier having to look only thirty years down the road,” said Robert Young, a geology professor at Western Carolina University. “But 6 to 8 inches of sea-level rise are no reason to celebrate.” Young said that the 30-year time window of the report undermines the accelerated effects that many expect later on in the century.
“After that, the acceleration gets a whole lot faster,” he said, “When it comes to long-term planning, like deciding where to build a hospital, a power plant or any public infrastructure with a long life span, thirty years is not a useful time frame.”
Molly Diggins, the State Director of the North Carolina Sierra Club, says that greater adaptation to rising sea-levels on the coast is imperative.
“We need to be planning for and adapting to an accelerated rate of sea level rise,” she said. “Instead of leadership on the issue, this administration has buried it. We seem to be intent on not being ready for what’s already happening.”
Some local communities are taking pragmatic steps to prepare for sea level rise, regardless of the time-horizon the legislature imposed on state agencies.
In Dare County, spokeswoman Dorothy Hester announced that the current political debate has had “little or no effect” on local planning efforts.
“The county’s hazard mitigation plan recognizes that sea level rise may impact the frequency and severity of hazards from natural events like floods, hurricanes, nor’easters and coastal erosion,” she said.
In Wilmington, Phil Prete, the city’s environmental planner, has said that planners are actively studying how sea-level rise will affect the area’s flood-prone regions.
“It gave us a really good assessment and some strategies to look at,” he said. “It also provided us with a template to apply to other aspects. There are plenty of decisions being made today on things with a life span of 50 to 100 years. To just pull the blinds at thirty years limits the ability to plan beyond that.”
Spencer Rogers, a coastal engineering specialist in the state and a member of the panel which authored the infamous report, added that, while these first steps are small ones in the right direction, the increase in the frequency and intensity of coastal flooding may soon work against the current state lesgislature. He noted that the legislature, in addition to cutting the allowable CRC forecast period from ninety to thirty years, also required the CRC to update its report every five years. .
“To put it in perspective, some of the things we’ve already done might have dealt with some of [the effects of climate change],” he said. “By the next sea level rise report in five years, he said, there might be an even clearer picture of what to expect. People have gotten creative along the way. That’s probably not going away.”
