Sustainable coastal development Sea level rise requires new forms of decision making.
U.S. cities facing sea level rise need to look beyond traditional strategies for managing issues such as critical erosion and coastal squeeze, ac- cording to new research from Lund University. Civil society initiatives must now play a crucial role in adapting society to climate change, the study argues. Using the City of Flagler Beach, Fla., as a case study, researcher Chad Boda illustrates that the traditional options put forward to ad- dress erosion and sea level rise affecting the city’s beach and coastal infrastructure either take a market-driven approach, which fails to take into account many environmental and social considerations, or are cur- rently too politically contentious to implement. The three options that have been considered in Flagler Beach are: • constructing a sea wall, • re-nourishing the beach, or • relocating coastal infrastructure. The sea wall option, long promoted by the Florida Department of Transportation, would protect vulnerable coastal infrastructure but would damage the local beach environment, which is central to the city’s tourism economy. The sea wall would also affect the nesting habitat of federally protected endangered sea turtles, the study shows. The beach re-nourishment option, proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, has the potential to provide incidental environmental benefits, but is primarily concerned with maximizing return on invest- ment. This option was later abandoned after Hurricane Matthew struck in October 2016, which wrought such extensive damage to the coastal environment that it was deemed no longer economically justified to proceed with the project. “Both of these options are ultimately based on a cost-benefit analy- sis, where return on investment takes precedence over environmental concerns such as maintaining the beach and the dunes. The aborted re- nourishment project makes this very clear. The hurricane has basically made it too costly to go ahead, even though re-nourishment would pro- vide for more social and economic benefits than a seawall,” Boda said. The study instead proposes, that from a scientific, environmental, and societal perspective, relocating coastal infrastructure would likely provide the most benefit to the city in the long run because it would protect both the beach and vulnerable infrastructure. Relocation has been promoted as the only viable long-term sustainable approach to beach management by coastal scientists since it would provide for the
Constructing a sea wall at Flagler Beach, Fla., would protect vulnerable coastal infrastructure but would damage the local beach environment, which is central to the city’s tourism economy. Beach re-nourishment was deemed too expensive to implement and the city’s residents and politicians are currently unwilling to relocate coastal infrastructure.
beach to naturally adapt to sea level rise. Implementing this solution, however, is not likely to be an easy task. “That option is currently too politically controversial as the local com- munity was concerned that local businesses could lose customers, that it would cause more traffic jams in the city, and that it would ultimately reduce property value,” Boda said. The study highlights that this course of events has left Flagler Beach with effectively only one option on the table — some form of sea wall — since re-nourishment was deemed too expensive to implement and the city’s residents and politicians are currently unwilling to relocate coastal infrastructure. “Yet this option, since it incorporates no procedure for adapting to sea level rise, will only lead to ever-increasing cost of erosion control, and the eventual loss of all sandy beaches along developed shorelines,” Boda said. According to Boda, this indicates that Flagler Beach, along with many other American cities unable to afford ever-more expensive re- nourishment projects, has effectively reached the limit of what actions it is able to take in terms of addressing erosion and sea level rise. The city is now effectively back where it started, holding the line against erosion with expensive and environmentally problematic temporary projects, with no clear plan for how to address future erosion caused by storms or to make the tough decisions needed to adapt to climate change. The continued degradation of the local environment will likely pose a major problem for the city’s tourism economy and tax base in the coming years, particularly as sea level rise continues. Social choice model The study argues that a new decision-making model — a social choice
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csengineermag.com
june 2018
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