Is coastal resiliency about re-building or retreating? Here's what's being considered.

With the consistent breach of the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold to mitigate the effects of climate change, our planet has been experiencing an accelerated rate of warming. Coastal resiliency has moved to the forefront of all conversations, but whether these efforts will be sustainable in the future, is a question that remains unanswered.

“The rate at which we need to plan for the future, needs to be sped up, because we are already seeing impacts today,” said Heidi Ricci, director of policy and advocacy at Mass Audubon, a New England-based nature conservation organization.

Massachusetts has 1, 519 miles of shoreline, with more than a third of it belonging to the Cape Cod region. These coastal regions are vulnerable to climate change as they are directly impacted by the rising sea level, which is causing frequent flooding, coastal erosion, loss of coastal habitats, and more frequent storms.

Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has proposed changes to the Chapter 91 regulations, formally established in 1866, which governs activities and projects on coastal and inland waterways. The regulatory changes were proposed in January, and the public comment period, which was initially supposed to end in March, ended on April 30.

The new regulations, Resilience 1.0, for the very first time, takes into account the projected sea level rise, as opposed to the historic sea level rise standard. Additionally, there are proposed changes to building considerations, engineering and construction standards, clarification on activities not requiring a permit or license, among other changes.

“They are very important and actually long overdue, so we're very supportive and happy to see those regulations moving forward,” Ricci said.

The importance of restoring natural habitats

For Ricci, the only major gap in the updated regulations, is on easing the process of acquiring permits for restoration projects, such as salt marshes and other natural habitat restoration. She said it is not a flaw, but it needs additional work.

“So much of our wetlands have been ditched, drained, fragmented, impacted … we really need to restore these wetlands because they're so important for climate resiliency,” Ricci said.

She also noted the importance of salt marshes to coastal resilience, adding that we are losing the salt marshes at a faster rate now, because of climate change, and their restoration should be made a priority.

“They absorb the impact of waves and storm flows, they sequester carbon, they are important habitats,” Ricci said.

The Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management offers the Coastal Habitat Program, which aims to protect and restore natural habitats through data-driven resiliency efforts. The program has a Salt Marsh Working Group, consisting of researchers and practitioners whose primary goal is to monitor salt marshes, prioritize their conservation and restoration, and raise awareness about their vulnerability to climate change.

Efforts in the Cape: Building resilience through modeling and analysis

In 2017, Cape Cod Commission launched the Resilient Cape Cod project, which was completed two years later. The project, which was funded by National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Regional Coastal Resilience grant, focused on investigating environmental and socio-economic effects of regional coastal resilience strategies.

As a result of that effort, the Cape Cod Coastal Planner, a map-based decision-support tool for implementing adaptation strategies to sea-level rise and other coastal hazards, was born.

The commission’s natural resource program manager, Heather McElroy, said that the tool “allows people to look at the planning layers to understand where flooding is happening, where erosion is happening, look at structures, critical facilities and low-lying roads that would be impacted by those coastal threats.”

She added that when new information becomes available, the planner is updated with it. “Although it is a process, it's not something that is necessarily done on an annual basis.”

In 2021, the commission, in partnership with Woods Hole Group, a company that provides coastal and environmental services through engineering and modelling, launched the Low Lying Roads project, which is coming to an end in June. The project’s aim was to identify and prioritize low-lying roads in the 15 towns of Cape Cod and strategize steps that can be taken to protect those roads.

Joseph Famely, Woods Hole Group’s climate and sustainability team lead, said that the idea was to help the towns learn about flood risk using the Massachusetts Coast Flood Risk Model, which helps planners and policy makers build resilience while planning for future changes.

Famely added that they also incorporated local input from towns to select higher priority road segments. “We kind of thought about different ways you could adapt a road, whether it was elevating it or moving it back.”

Planning and building from a futuristic point of view

Shannon Holst, floodplain specialist with Cape Cod Cooperative, said that the biggest issue is that people don’t understand the potential for future sea-level rise and subsequent storms that could happen.

“If they are on a floodplain, the fact that they haven't flooded yet is just good luck on their part; It doesn't mean that they will never flood there.”

She added that it depends on the town officials and administration, to decide the strategies they want to implement in terms of coastal resiliency.

“A lot of the things that towns do are on five-year planning license, which is nothing.”

The focus should be on flexibility, according to Famely. He said “building basic infrastructure that's able to accommodate different design and different iterations over time” is the right course of action.

But there are places, that in the near future, could be beyond saving.

“If that's an area that is at a high risk of repetitive inundation … past a certain tipping point, it doesn't make sense to keep building,” Famely said.

Starting a conversation about the inevitable ultimate solution: retreat

While the current efforts and projects buy some time, everything ultimately points towards the word “retreat.” Sooner or later, that is going to be the ultimate step, when the coastal plains get inundated because of extreme sea level rise.

It is going to be the most difficult conversation that the government officials at the state and local levels would have to navigate, according to Ricci. “No one wants to uproot people from their homes.”

Chris Powicki, chair of Sierra Club’s Cape Cod & Islands group, believes that the ultimate solution is to “dramatically” and “rapidly” reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

For Powicki, in the long run, armoring, which is a way of building physical structures to protect shorelines, is not the answer, retreat is.

“We've already locked in a certain amount of sea level rise into the future, and without retreats, we're going to face continued damage and loss.”

He added that the challenge would be to convince property owners to move further back from the beach.

Holst agrees that retreat is a difficult topic, and not as simple to implement.

“People love their homes. There are town budgets. A lot of tax dollars come from waterfront properties. So, there's a lot to consider in that.”

Leaning toward building more green infrastructure

Andrew Gottlieb, executive director of Association to Preserve Cape Cod, said that the notion that armoring the coastline will slow coastal erosion is something that property owners favor as it protects their lands, but this is problematic as “they also tend to result in the absence of a beach.”

He added that more serious efforts need to be put into reversing the cause of the problem of sea level rise. “I don't know that we're going to be able to keep elevating to the point where we can stay above the rising waters,” Gottlieb said.

The “need for a managed retreat” and “enhancement of natural systems” is the solution, Gottlieb said.

Gregory Berman, Chatham’s natural resources director, said that the winter storms have been pushing a lot of water up into low lying areas and this phenomenon has happening more frequently.

“I mean, in a thousand years, the properties aren't going to be viable. In five years, they probably will be so it's that in between time, that's really where the rubber meets the road with these adaptation methods,” Berman said.

While there are various techniques that can be employed to protect the land and build resilience through gray and green infrastructural developments, Berman said “we really don't want to eliminate some of the aspects of the greener end of that spectrum.”

Green infrastructure refers to natural restoration efforts such as salt marsh restoration, rainwater harvesting, land conservation. Gray infrastructure on the other hand refers to man-made structures that armor coastlines but are not sustainable.

Gottlieb agreed and said that building green infrastructure is a better solution as compared to building gray infrastructure. “That's our best way of fighting back.”

Climate change has put a timer on a lot of state and nationwide efforts, coastal resiliency being one of them.

Berman believes that the people will ultimately have to adapt as the beach changes and living with those changes.

He added that sea level rise has only been accelerating, and people are witnessing the impacts of the rising water level, through frequent storms and flooding, among other extreme weather events.

“We can't stop working on these issues because climate change is not stopping and we need to be prepared for more and more change,” Powicki said.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Regulations related to coastal and inland waterways proposed by state DEP