A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation

Annotated Table of Contents A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation Uniting Design, Economics, and Policy Edited by Carolyn Kousky, Billy Fleming, and Alan M. Berger

Section I: New Approaches to Designing and Implementing Coastal Resilience 1. Structures of Coastal Resilience: Adaptive Design for Jamaica Bay, Catherine Seavitt Over the last several decades, development occurring in vulnerable coastal communities has significantly increased the impacts of flooding. Unfortunately, current U.S. hazard reduction policies mostly take a reactionary approach to flooding, and decision-makers are haphazard in implementing mitigation strategies.

The result is a muddled distribution of flood infrastructure and a disjointed set of flood mitigation policies across coastal regions. In this chapter, we discuss an integrated framework of flood mitigation strategies that coastal communities can implement across multiple spatial and temporal scales. This framework comprises four strategies: avoid (get out of the way), resist (stand and fight), accommodate (let it flood), and communicate (tell the story of risk). We discuss the pros and cons of each structural and non-structural mitigation technique and the benefits of a synergistic approach towards flood hazard mitigation.

2. Coastal Urbanism: Designing the Future Waterfront, Rafi Segal and Susannah Drake In cities such as New York and Boston, large scale coastal climate adaptation projects are being planned.

Matthijs Bouw’s chapter reflects on the challenges that come with the design and implementation of such projects. Using examples from his own experience, such as the Big U and follow-up projects for the coastal protection of Lower Manhattan, the author argues that these are a new type of project that requires intensive collaborative learning to overcome multiple challenges, the most pertinent of which are complexity (because of

the integration with existing urban fabric, and the need to design for multiple hazards), unpredictability (because of the uncertainty in climate projections) and equity (because many tend to focus on the protection of high-value urban areas). Given the accelerating impacts of the climate crisis, Bouw states, it is critical to quickly build the ‘muscle’ to be able to adapt in time.

3. Dutch Design along the American Coast, Matthijs Bouw 4. Resilient by Design in San Francisco, Karen M'Closkey and Keith Vandersys Section II: Planning the Next Generation of Coastal Communities 5. A Comprehensive Framework for Coastal Risk Reduction: Charting a Path Towards Resiliency, Sam Brody 6. Coding Flux: From “End-State’ Zoning to Zoning Process and Potential, Fadi Masoud and David Vega-Barachowitz There are many reasons to support the need for the political backing and programmatic expansion of public funding for coastal adaptation, particularly at the federal level, starting with the fact that public funding and finance are well-known and proven vehicles to pay for infrastructure. Coastal adaptation—in capital projects, operations and maintenance, and related services—is expensive. Unlike private funding, further, publicly supported infrastructure allows for a range of public benefits. Consequently, public funding and public-sector finance of infrastructure are more reliably equitable in process and outcomes. Given the century-long history of traditional public funds and financing vehicles, they are not only well equipped to handle the scale of coastal adaptation demands but can also be harnessed to better allocate beneficiaries and their respective shares of the costs of adaptation. This chapter explores the potential for expanding public funding and finance for the purposes of coastal adaptation.

7. Adapting Coastal Drinking Water to Rising Seas, Allison Lassiter As the climate warms, coastal communities will face changing weather-related extreme events, such as floods, hurricanes, and tropical storms. Insurance is critical for recovery from coastal disasters; it provides financial protection to those impacted, thus limiting the extreme hardship that can occur for uninsured households after a damaging disaster. As coastal disaster events become more frequent, insurance is going to be increasingly necessary to maintain resilience. Yet, the same conditions that are making insurance more critical than ever for coastal communities also have the potential to stress property insurance markets. This chapter focuses on households and discusses insurance against coastal extremes and what necessary policy reforms are needed to ensure equitable financial recovery at the coast.

Section III: Innovative Policy and Finance for Coastal Adaptation 8. Public Financing of Coastal Adaptation, Carlos Martin A typical approach used by state and local governments to build costly climate adaptation projects is to access capital through the use of bonds. A new kind of pay-for-success debt-financing tool -- an Environmental Impact Bond (EIB) — can helps public sector entities access capital, tie spending to improved environmental (or social) outcomes, financially involve local public or private asset owners in the transaction, and evaluate and report on project outcomes. EIBs have financed green infrastructure in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, and other entities are actively exploring how they might use EIBs to address their climate adaptation challenges.

Properly designed and structured, an EIB transaction can address three common challenges associated with implementing climate adaptation projects: building public support, finding sufficient capital, and ensuring capital is efficiently deployed to realize mutual climate resilience goals. Furthermore, through careful structuring EIBs can be especially attractive to a growing class of investors — called “impact investors” — who seek to put their money into projects, companies, or municipal issuers that perform better in terms of environmental or social benefits; impact investors’ financial return is based on validated environmental or social outcomes. This chapter discusses how these new outcomes-based financial tools represent a significant opportunity for states and communities to attract investors to projects that unite citizens to improve and accelerate investment in climate resilience.

9. Adapt/Prepare/Retreat: A Tale of Two Cities, Joyce Coffee As sea level rise drives seawater further inland, drinking water supplies of some coastal cities will be contaminated. This chapter evaluates how climate change is shifting the location of “salt lines,” the brackish zone where fresh water meets the ocean, and implications for drinking water management. It focuses on Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which draws water from the Delaware River. The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) has been coordinating downstream water flows within the watershed since the 1960s to manage salinity at the river’s estuary. Yet, despite the strength of the DRBC’s flow and salinity management, eventually the salt line will move far enough upriver that it will encroach on Philadelphia’s drinking water intakes. Philadelphia will need to adapt its infrastructure, policies, and water management practices. In doing so, it will face choices about continuing to pattern the water system as it always has been or imagining a new future of water provision that is both affordable and resilient to changes in salinity. This chapter reviews the history of managing salt within the Delaware River, sea level rise scenarios, salinity regulations, and possible adaptation strategies. Examining the case of the Philadelphia opens larger questions on how coastal communities can be supported at scale as they adapt their water systems to shifting salt lines.

10. New Options for Financing – Environmental Impact Bonds, Shannon Cunniff Sea-level rise (SLR) already has led to abandonment of some places, and this phenomenon will increase dramatically with ever-rising seas. Rising seas could convert our coasts into a toxic stew of water and unsightly, smelly, and dangerous construction debris. This chapter presents a framework to begin thinking proactively about how to organize and finance cleanup of residential properties abandoned due to SLR before

this happens. This skeletal framework rests on certain assumptions, so the discussion first raises questions about who should pay and why before asserting that properties at risk of abandonment should finance their own cleanup. Potential general financing mechanisms receive treatment before giving greater consideration to two legal mechanisms for making properties pay for their own cleanup. Discussion of a series of additional issues to consider in developing and financing a cleanup program concludes the chapter.

11. Clean Up after Yourselves: Legal and Financial Options for Relocation Clean Up, Thomas Ruppert In the face of the housing, climate, and ecological crises, the institution of zoning has proven itself a weak palliative. How can zoning, which emerged in large part to regulate uncertainty and preserve property values, be reimagined as a more robust policy tool that incentivizes climate resilience and adaptation? While public administrators and planners are charged with the regulation of land and its use, far too often they overlook opportunities to link the two—to frame and regulate the use of land based on its underlying environmental and ecological conditions. This chapter questions the role of static, end state zoning in favor of flux zoning, a concept that integrates open-ended systems and processes into land use regulation over time.