It’s not hard to get overwhelmed when considering your community’s current flood and erosion problems. Add in projections for what future climates will bring and it’s enough to make you want to just stay at home (at least until the sea comes into your home).
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).