Responding to Sea Level Rise: Does Short‐Term Risk Reduction Inhibit Successful Long‐Term Adaptation?

Abstract

Most existing coastal climate‐adaptation planning processes, and the research supporting them, tightly focus on how to use land use planning, policy tools, and infrastructure spending to reduce risks from rising seas and changing storm conditions. While central to community response to sea level rise, we argue that the exclusive nature of this focus biases against and delays decisions to take more discontinuous, yet proactive, actions to adapt—for example, relocation and aggressive individual protection investments. Public policies should anticipate real estate market responses to risk reduction to avoid large costs—social and financial—when and if sea level rise and other climate‐related factors elevate the risks to such high levels that discontinuous responses become the least bad alternative.

Economic Values of Coastal Erosion Management: Joint Estimation of Use and Passive Use Values With Recreation Demand and Contingent Valuation Data

“…We expect that beach erosion management can affect non-use values for some portion of stakeholders, and our sampling protocol captures information from users and (Pompe 2008;Landry and Hindsley 2011;Ranson 2012;Landry and Allen 2017), but are otherwise rare in the literature. Such estimates are instrumental in application of optimal control models to coastal management (Slott, Smith, and Murray 2008;Smith et al 2009;Landry 2011;Lazarus et al 2011;McNamara and Keeler 2013;Williams et al 2013;McNamara et al 2015;Jin, et al 2015;Gopalakrishnan et al 2016Gopalakrishnan et al , 2017Keeler, McNamara, and Irish 2018;Mullin, Smith, and McNamara 2018).…”

“…Incremental values for beach width indicate mean WTP of $0.24 per meter and median WTP of $0.47 per meter. Values for changing beach conditions that vary with policy approach could be instrumental in analysis of shoreline management and climate adaptation, wherein changes in the built environment, public infrastructure, environmental conditions, human behavior, and policy occur within a tightly coupled human-natural system with considerable spatial and temporal complexity (Slott, Smith, and Murray 2008;Smith et al 2009;Landry 2011;Lazarus et al 2011;McNamara and Keeler 2013;Williams et al 2013;McNamara et al 2015;Jin, et al 2015;Gopalakrishnan et al 2016Gopalakrishnan et al , 2017Keeler, McNamara, and Irish 2018;Mullin, Smith, and McNamara 2018).…”

Defining Coastal Resilience

“…The variety of possible dynamical attractors for coastal human-environmental systems remains largely unknown. If a boom-and-bust oscillator is potentially one attractor, then a trajectory on that attractor may be the tendency for coastal risk to intensify through a feedback between hazard protection and investment in development [102,103,116,117,120,[122][123][124][125]. Beyond its promise of short-term financial gain in coastal real estate markets, this is not necessarily a preferred trajectory, or attractor, to be locked into.…”

OECD Environment Policy Papers

“…While the review of applications is not a comprehensive assessment of the extent to which OECD countries have implemented NbS to manage water-related disasters, is does give an indication that the majority of NbS implemented on the ground have been launched as one-off projects. This is reinforced by recent studies which have found that NbS are usually implemented on a pilot basis and in an ad hoc way (Kapos et al, 2019 [4] ; Browder et al, 2019 [5] ; Trémolet S. et al, 2019 [6] ; Wingfield et al, 2019 [73] ). These projects tend to benefits from vested supporters, but often lack the policy and financial framework to apply them more systematically, more frequently, and at larger scale.…”

“…Global urban property damage from flooding alone costs around USD 120 billion per year (Browder et al, 2019 [5] ). The occurrence of heavy rain is projected to occur almost twice as often with each further degree of warming, and the total amount of precipitation from these events is also likely to roughly double per degree At the same time, built-up areas have increased by 15 to changing climatic conditions (Kabisch et al, 2016 [25] ; Nesshöver et al, 2017 [38] ; Kapos et al, 2019 [4] ).…”