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While some naysayers argue that global warming isn't a fact and that government shouldn't do anything about it, here are two trends well-known to coastal residents:
Beach erosion due to the action of wind, waves and weather is a fact of life, and beach communities up and down the East Coast constantly struggle to keep the ocean at bay.
Sea level is rising as land subsides and erodes, and not just on the ocean side, either. Coastal geologists have documented the phenomenon even as coastal area property owners increasingly turn to sandbags, sand-pumping programs and bulkheads on sounds and other inland waters to protect their property.
Now a new report takes note of several developments: While these strategies may hold back the water's worst effects, they may also block the landward movement of wildlife habitat and important wetlands. In short, they "probably violate the Clean Water Act," the report says.
The report, by J.G. Titus, a federal government expert on sea level rise who independently published his findings in a publication called Environmental Research Letters, acknowledges that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers authorizes beachfront and other land preservation techniques widely used in coastal areas.
But Titus and his coauthors argue that this policy backfires because it does not consider the negative effects of bulkheads and other hardened structures on the coastal environment. That includes the loss of wetlands that act as important stormwater buffers and filters of runoff and help keep groundwater and surface water clean. In fact, they argue, one reason coastal communities have to resort to shore protection strategies is due to the loss of habitat and wetlands.
Growth policies worsen the effect. "Even though we know sea level is rising," Titus told News & Observer reporter Lynn Bonner, "people are moving into vulnerable areas at a rapid rate. It exposes people to living below sea level. It also stops the wetlands from moving inland."
Titus' research, available online at papers.risingsea.net/ERL, found that more than 60 percent of the coastal area land that could be submerged by sea level rise over the next century has already been developed, Bonner reported. Only 10 percent of it has been preserved.
Remaining low-lying lands will become populated, the authors believe, "if business-as-usual development continues. Maintaining this development as sea level rises would require increasingly ambitious shore protection."
The implications of the report should prompt a state and federal review of both the law and growth politics - and development of a rational approach for how to deal with rising sea level. Some land can be preserved and a lot of land cannot, and it will become necessary to allow some land to be abandoned so that ecosystems can move inland. A critical question, it said, is "to ask whether this generation should continue to build new communities in vacant land vulnerable to a rising sea."
The question answers itself.
