From the massive Rotterdam sea gate and Hamburg’s new floodproof HafenCity to absorptive “sponge cities” in China and floating farms in Bangladesh, projects designed to mitigate coastal climate change worldwide represent feats of imagination and logistics. Here in New England, the Islands of Martha’s Vineyard, Gosnold (the Elizabeth Islands), and Nantucket deserve no less: creative, holistic, and scalable approaches to their unique needs and transformation over time.
Even more than mainland coastal communities, adapting to coastal change is integral to life on the Islands, but we can’t do it all at once — or on our own. It’s time to create the collaborative foundations necessary for change and learning to live with water. Without adequate resources, investments, creative solutions, and regulatory reform, our communities will experience unmitigated climate impacts — and have more difficulty recovering from disaster after it strikes. Yet by working together, we can create resiliency while preparing for retreat from migrating shorelines.
The Trustees, which owns and protects wildlife refuges, coastal upland areas and more than 17 miles of beach on the Islands, has conserved these sensitive landscapes by working with landowners, land trusts, philanthropists, elected officials, and agency experts. We create and advocate for public policies and funding, lead statewide and regional coalitions, spearhead education and outreach efforts, and negotiate passage of state and federal legislative and regulatory reforms.
Investments in climate mitigation, adaptation, and resiliency are at the core of our coastal projects. Key to that is leveraging private resources and bringing conservation, adaptation, and restoration projects to scale, but we cannot accomplish this important work alone. Lawmakers at all levels of government need to acknowledge the urgency of climate impacts and prioritize and increase investments in climate-facing policies and strategies.
The Trustees and our partners are urging the U.S. Congress and Massachusetts legislative and agency leaders to make significant investments in natural “infrastructure,” especially large-scale coastal restoration projects and the creation of new, resilient waterfront parks. To adapt to climate impacts, we need to redesign and replace transportation infrastructure — roads, bridges, dams and culverts — and balance human recreational and development wants with important habitat and natural resource needs. The state also needs to enact a new Flood Risk Protection Program to acquire properties and relocate homeowners and small businesses from current and future flood-prone zones, focusing on environmental justice populations and low- and middle-income homeowners.
We need to set forth and advocate for a bold vision for the future of our Islands that goes beyond a traditional understanding of land conservation and restoration. To do that, we must consider:
CONSERVATION TECHNIQUES Federal, state and local decision makers need to prioritize and increase investments in our natural coastlines and habitats, not only areas of built infrastructure. We must expand existing resiliency strategies and pilot new approaches that prioritize nature-based solutions. We can look to the innovative techniques of other coastal communities like the New Jersey Blue Acres property buyout program, which has used mostly federal funds to buy and then demolish about 1,000 flood-prone homes from willing sellers. Land is permanently preserved as publicly accessible open space and a natural buffer against future storms and floods.
FUTURE-FACING DESIGNS Communities need to collectively focus on seeking and implementing creative approaches to living with water, from deployable barriers and absorptive landscapes to floating, elevated, and amphibious infrastructure. That means engaging multiple disciplines and the next generation in thinking about how we design for the future along the lines of Nantucket’s Envision Resilience and Virginia-based RISE’s coastal resilience laboratory.
FORWARD-THINKING LEGISLATION With our universities and research institutions, Massachusetts should drive new science and innovation and lead the country by integrating climate science into planning and development projects and making permitting for climate resiliency measures easier and less expensive through regulatory reform. The Trustees, for instance, is partnering with state agencies to streamline permitting requirements for nature-based coastal initiatives. Balancing land conservation and restoration with other priorities means revising current laws and experimenting with techniques such as the transfer of development rights or California’s proposed buy-rent-retreat program, in which communities could buy vulnerable coastal properties and rent them out (to the homeowners or someone else) as long as they are safe to inhabit.
INNOVATIVE, CONSISTENT FINANCING Public and private partners can coordinate to establish robust streams of dedicated revenue for climate mitigation, adaptation, and resiliency and find new ways of supporting promising pilot projects with public and private funding. The Trustees is working with a coalition of non-profit groups to identify new potential sources of dedicated funding to create $1 billion for climate resiliency programs over 10 years. Elsewhere, officials in Maryland created Resilience Authorities to help local governments flexibly fund and manage large infrastructure projects to address the effects of climate change.
COLLABORATIVE AND CREATIVE APPROACHES Communities must reach out to each other and to new partner organizations that can help bring ideas and approaches to scale. Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket are increasingly finding ways to unite towns and approach climate resiliency projects from island-wide perspectives. The appointment of full-time climate change coordinators is a critical step forward. We can create more opportunities to share knowledge, assess vulnerabilities and priorities, and act with common goals in mind, inspired by local initiatives such as LA Safe in Louisiana and the international climate change alliance between Boston, Cambridge, and Copenhagen.
Earlier this year, Miami published a draft of its $3.8 billion stormwater master plan draft. It proposes seawalls and strengthening natural resources like coral reefs but also concepts such as floating neighborhoods and streets converted into canals. “The most common question I get asked is whether Miami is going to be here in 50 years, whether it’s going to be here in 100 years,” said Miami Mayor Francis Suarez while announcing the plan.
We need radical thinking, too. But unlike highly developed urban centers, we don’t have to wonder if the Islands, with their natural shorelines and upland areas, will still be around in 50 years. Instead, we are faced with questions of how to adapt their vulnerable edges and find places to retreat. It’s important to be flexible and cooperative as we seek answers — and partners. Success depends on forging new relationships that will build the momentum, energy, and optimism we need to bolster our natural defenses and weather the changes to come.