Jim Titus Writes: How Delaware (And Other Coastal States) Respond To Rising Sea Level

Jim Titus is giving us fair warning here about what's coming down the pike and the kinds of decisions that our state is going to have to make in the near future about sustainability and livability in terms of land use and the inadequacy of laws currently on the books.
From the inbox:

I am writing to let you know about a new sea level rise planning study recently published in the peer-review journal, Environmental Research Letters. There was an article in the News-Journal, by Molly Murray, about the study, "Del. wetlands at brunt of warming". The study makes a first attempt to create maps about where people are likely to hold back the sea, to start a dialogue on where we protect and where we will allow wetlands to migrate inland. The study also concludes that level of shore protection has cumulative impact which violates Clean Water Act.

Could you let people know about this study, and/or start thinking about the issues we raise? Maps can be found HERE, while a statewide summary, The Likelihood of Shore Protection: Delaware, can be found HERE.

Those sites also have links to the journal article itself which covers the Atlantic Coast; .pdf link HERE.

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State and local governments plan for development of most land vulnerable to rising sea level along the US Atlantic coast (study)

Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flood Frequency Viewer (via WNJ)

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Why The State Must Start To Control County Land Use!!

An excerpt from the study ~

Our results suggest that the majority of low-lying lands along the US Atlantic coast will become populated if business-as-usual development continues. Maintaining this development as sea level rises would require increasingly ambitious shore protection [10]. The US experience protecting populated areas below sea level from flooding is mostly limited to metropolitan New Orleans [15]. Sea level rise could leave communities similarly vulnerable throughout the US Atlantic coast.

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The resulting shore protection could imperil a key environmental objective in the United States: the preservation of tidal wetlands. In the 1970s, the United States collectively decided to stop creating new coastal communities by filling marshes and swamps [25, 26], and enacted other policies [13, 19, 26–28] to preserve tidal wetlands along the Atlantic coast. But these ecosystems may not be sustained if sea level accelerates. At the current rate of sea level rise, most tidal wetlands are able to keep pace through sedimentation and peat formation; but their ability to keep pace with a rate greater than 5–10 mm yr–1 is doubtful [10].

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To survive, these ecosystems would have to migrate inland [4, 10, 11]. With only 9% of the lowest land set aside for conservation, a large-scale migration would require either a halt to construction in most coastal floodplains or an eventual abandonment of many developed areas [10, 19]. But current policies promote the opposite [10].

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