To date, much of the funding that addresses coastal resiliency on the North Shore has come from state sources, including CZM and MassBays. EEA and CZM provided $4.5 million for 50 North Shore projects focused on coastal resilience, coastal pollution remediation, healthy estuaries, and climate planning and action over the last five years.
Going forward, how much more will it cost us to prepare for sea-level rise and storm impacts? We don’t know for sure, and it depends on how much we do. It can be difficult to weigh long-term needs against short-term exigencies, and cities, towns and coastal property owners are often challenged by upfront mitigation costs. But it’s apparent that fund- ing needs to match the potential magnitude of the threat. Once past a tipping point, recovery and repair can far exceed mitigation costs, if recovery remains an option. Consider a statistic from the National Institute of Building Sciences, which found that every $1 spent on federally funded mitigation grants saves the nation $6 in future disaster costs.
The price of doing nothing is clear—and it will particularly affect our most threatened wildlife species, beloved landscapes, and vulnerable human populations. The Trustees proposes that we need to look beyond our traditional community coffers and grants, and develop radical new ways of funding and incentivizing resiliency and conservation on a consistent, regional basis. Programs such as emissions trading systems, green/blue/resiliency bonds, and climate funds and derivatives are just the tip of the iceberg. So are mechanisms like insurance policies that offer lower premiums for taking steps to reduce climate risks and banks (e.g. Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank, New Jersey’s Energy Resilience Bank) that focus on investing in infrastructure, services, risk management, and sustainability.
Capital investment is only part of the equation. As important, we need to support social science research that will help us find ways to make the rapid, significant psychological shifts as a society that are required to adapt to climate change. We need to understand better what it is that holds us back from investing more in climate solutions now and conserving our coast for generations to come.