Download Introduction - Coastal Climate Wiki

Preparing Your Coast
Mitigation, Adaptation, and
Costs of “Building Resiliency”
Oceans of Change
 Though taking action to fight climate change could
significantly lessen its effects, greenhouse gases
already in the atmosphere have committed us to
decades and perhaps even centuries of continued
warming.
 Coastal communities should therefore prepare to
adapt to future changes even as efforts progress to
mitigate, or lessen, climate change by reducing
greenhouse gas emissions.
 Sea level, ocean acidification, sea surface
temperatures, ocean heat, and ocean circulation
have all been changing in ways unknown for
thousands of years.
Oceans of Change (cont’d)
 Arctic sea ice melted significantly more in summer in
the last 30 years, and storms are intensifying.
 Coastal ecosystems stand to be damaged, and
coasts will likely erode from the intensified storm
surges and flooding brought on by climate change.
 Coastal communities will need to prepare adaptation
strategies to cope.
Responding to Change
 Our nation's experience in managing and protecting its
inhabitants, resources, and infrastructure has been
based on our relatively stable historic climate.
 But adaptation to climate change requires an
appreciation of possible conditions that lie outside the
realm of experience.
 Further, adaptation will require action from a range of
decision makers, from federal, state, tribal, and local
governments, the private sector, non-governmental
organizations, and community groups.
 Adaptation can mean both adjusting to the negative
effects of climate change as well as taking advantage of
any positive consequences of change.
Responding to Change (cont’d)
 In the short term, adaptation actions that can be most
easily implemented are low-cost strategies with win-win
outcomes, ones that offer immediate benefits, and those
that reverse poor policies and practices.
 Often adaptations make ecological and human structural
systems more resilient and healthy, both now and in the
future; short-term solutions that make things worse
long-term are not good adaptive choices.
 Decision makers would be more effective to consider the
relationship between adaptive actions and mitigation;
adaptive actions that make it more difficult for mitigation
are not good choices.
Building Resilience
 Building resilience is an important goal related to
adaptation and mitigation, and can help coastal
communities regardless of the precise effects of
climate change.
 Improving resilience can mean altering fisheries
management to take advantage of new species
moving into a region as traditional commercial
species dwindle.
 It could mean improving migration routes for
species that must move to adapt to climate change.
Building Resilience (cont’d)
 It could mean restoring natural floodways to improve
a community's flood defenses.
 It could mean educating the public to let them know
how they can help.
Tips for Planners
 Few local climate change predictions are available,
so identifying trends will be important for coastal
planners.
 Decision makers should be cautious about plans
based on future projections with specific numbers
attached, although in many cases states need to
determine a specific number within given
parameters.
 These plans may seem more defensible to
stakeholders, but uncertainty in projections could
mean that such adaptation plans over- or underprepare for the future.
Tips for Planners (cont’d)
 Instead, decision makers may find it more
productive to look for existing vulnerabilities in their
communities and map these together with a range of
climate change projections to see what areas of
concern emerge.
 That can provide a starting point for thinking about
adaptation options, comprehensive scenario
building, hazard planning, and what if/how much
exercises.
 Decision makers should also consider the possibility
of abrupt changes.
Tips for Planners (cont’d)
 Such tipping points could create new irreversible
conditions like ice-free summers, extreme sea level
rise, or sharp increases in extraordinarily damaging
weather.
 Adapting to these impacts could require
consideration of radical adaptation measures like
large-scale retreat of populations from at-risk areas.
 Prudent communities will consider these kinds of
high risk, low probability events in order to have
"worst-case scenario" plans on the books.