Coastal Climate Adaptation: When Life isn’t So Beachy

Published: April 7th, 2011

By Keith Kloor

When I was studying environmental policy in graduate school, I had a professor whose family owned a home on Fire Island, a barrier beach off the coast of eastern Long Island in New York. Fire Island, for those unfamiliar with it, is a kaleidoscopic landscape where all sorts of people and wild nature co-exist, as this New York Times article describes:

Nude sunbathers, yuppie weekenders, recluses and a proudly gay resort village all lay claim to parts of the slender, 30-mile barrier beach. So do piping plovers, a sunken forest and New York State's only federally designated wilderness.

Additionally, there are long-standing communities that have established deep roots in the sand. (My old professor and his family are part of one such enclave.)

Coastal erosion. Credit: C&K Photo/flickr.

It's a great place (I usually get there once a summer), but it's also on borrowed time, like many barrier islands. Homeowners endlessly battle beach erosion from storms large and small. Debates over whether that battle is worth fighting and who should subsidize it have also raged endlessly.

I remember my professor telling me about one such controversy in the early 2000s, when he said his community decided to pay for its own beach replenishment (at a huge cost), rather than rely on public help. Their decision was based on sentiments such as this one, expressed in a 2001 letter to the NYT:

The Fire Islanders who built their homes knowing full well the risk of erosion, storms and hurricanes expect the rest of us to pay for protection for their homes in the form of beach replenishment, which will undoubtedly have to be repeated every three to five years at an enormous cost to taxpayers.

The homeowners are talking about paying for it themselves despite the objections of those who want to study the environmental impact such sand dredging might cause. But even if such damage to the environment proves small, are they going to be willing to pay for the project themselves or are they at some point, going to seek and receive tax dollars for continuing the projects? And will this not encourage more development and more erosion to the fragile ecosystem?

Such replenishment projects often require that sand be pumped in from miles offshore onto the beach. Some ecologists say that disturbs delicate marine habitat and species. In 2001, when Fire Island homeowners were going forward with their self-financed beach replenishment, Susan Antenen, the director of coastal conservation for The Nature Conservancy, warned about the consequences:

In the short run it has problems with offshore habitat destruction and temporary short-term disturbance to the the intertidal zone. It's also ecologically bad for the island in the longer term because it interferes with coastal processes where beaches have to be able to move and islands have to be able to move.

Of course, if I was a homeowner with a nice ocean view, I wouldn't want my house to "move" out into the sea or even into the next village, which may not be be as nice as mine. So I can understand why well-to-do Fire Island residents would want to take matters into their own hands, and why they might not be as worried about being at cross purposes with the the concerns of ecologists. Besides, it's not as if the hordes of people that descend every summer have been the only ones to upset the delicate balance of the Fire Island ecosystem.

I was reminded of this particular episode involving my old professor and his Fire Island community when I read about a new study in today's New York Times, which the paper's Green blog describes with this headline, "The rich are different: They can buy more sand."

The study, which is published online today in Geophysical Research Letters, modeled the anticipated response to continued coastal erosion from climate change-related sea level rise. As the NYT summarizes, the researchers found that wealthier towns, in "responding most aggressively to maintain their beaches," will "spare no effort" to pay for sand replenishment. But in doing so, they would decrease the amount of sand available to everyone in that area and drive up the cost. Poorer communities, unable to afford the pricier sand, would have to watch their beaches wash away.

The upshot of the study, according to the authors:

More broadly, coupling economic and physical models reveals equity and sustainability implications of coastal climate adaptation as well as patterns of coastline change that a physical model alone would overlook.

I still think that anyone with a home on a barrier beach is living on borrowed time. Some just have less time than others.

Posted in Impacts, Responses, Oceans & Coasts, Sea Level, Policy, Society, Frontier Earth

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Comments

By Russell (Arlington VA)
on April 7th, 2011

Lived in Santa Cruz area most of my life - erosion of the soft cliffs is ongoing and before the Coastal Commission put the brakes on, the wealthy armored the cliffs with boulders and sprayed gunnite. Of course, this is rolling downhill as s**t usually does originating with two manmade developments. One is the statewide system of dams. They are all filling with sediment that once replenished the beaches. Dams like San Clemente and Los Padres dams on the Carmel River are almost useless - San Clemente built to hold 1400 acre-feet now can hold150 acre-feet and Los Padres has fallen from 3000 acre-feet to 2000. This is a systemic problem along coasts where man has mucked around with streamflows. The other problem [in Santa Cruz] was the yacht harbor jetties, built in the mid-1950’s. They stopped the littoral drift of sand and eventually led the “downstream” community of Capitola to build it’s own small jetty and truck in sand to save its beach street and tourist industry. As well, many “downstream” homeowners scrambled to try legal armoring of their oceanfront properties - with more or less success. We could probably do a better job of dealing with beach erosion and ocean rise if we cleaned out natural repleneshers of our beaches - for a lot less money and with a more democratic model of equality.

By Jack Hughes (Nelson, New Zealand)
on April 8th, 2011

Hi Keith,

Are you talking about peak sand ?

By Gaythia (Berthoud, CO)
on April 8th, 2011

@Jack, Peak sand is a great term, but for the eastern US coast, wouldn’t that mean the time of maximum runoff from melting, post Ice Age glaciers? Another ice age cycle would be the ultimate beach replenishment project. Otherwise, humans are just messing slightly with the river of sand, the littoral drift described by Russell.

@Russell, The natural erosion process is something that Santa Cruz residents still do not accept. They have not given up on attempting to thwart this with cliff coatings and seawalls (with nicely colored hues for the fake rock walls, of course), See for example: http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_15520315

A book on human interactions with the California coast which I would recommend is: Living with the Changing California Coast by Griggs, Patsch and Savoy.

By Jonathan Gilligan
on April 11th, 2011

I would strongly recommend reading Orrin Pilkey’s work on this topic. Both “The Corps and the Shore” (concerned with natural erosion, not exacerbated by climate change) and “The Rising Sea” are short, articulate, and compelling.

To dramatically oversimplify, Pilkey’s takeaway message is that most work on coastal engineering is stupid and futile, often driven by excessive reliance on models that dramatically underestimate the scope of the geophysical problems, and that US coastal policy is largely a matter of ruining beaches for everyone in order to protect the vacation houses of the rich (“the New Jersification of the coast’)

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