Sea level rise is coming
Ready or not
It’s been a tough year for those who care about the environment, climate change, sea level rise, or public health, including safe drinking water.
Nevertheless, like our Pacific Northwest salmon swimming upstream, we’ve been pushing back at a state and local level against the torrent of deregulation, staff reductions, and budget cuts flowing from DC, and we have results to show for it.
Over the next three weeks, I’ll bring you up to date on our local progress on sea level rise, drinking water, and PFAS.
King tides
This coming weekend’s Pacific Northwest king tides, abnormally high tides caused by an alignment between earth, sun, and moon, may once again coincide with a winter storm and cause the greatest risk of coastal flooding since December 2022 and give us another foretaste of a future with sea level rise.
Paradoxically, since 2022, we’ve seen more real estate placed in harm’s way along our shorelines while local governments lack the political will to prevent it. The flood risk, even though Zillow deletes climate risk data from listings after complaints it harms sales, means that long-term full-time shoreline residents are being displaced by cash buyers, second homeowners, and short-term rental landlords in a process of shoreline gentrification.
Shoreline homeowners press for hard armoring, or bulkheads, although these further destroy beaches while offering little protection from sea level rise. Spawning fish, nesting birds, and marine mammals pay the price as their habitat is lost.
Where do we start to reverse these trends? Washington is different than many states in that state and local governments go out of their way to be open and consultative, and there are many ways for a concerned resident to get involved.
From 2018 to 2022, I served on up to half a dozen county and state advisory committees around Puget Sound recovery, mostly ranking recovery projects for funding from EPA’s National Estuary Program, or NEP, among them the Habitat Strategic Initiative Advisory Team, which, as the name suggests, primarily looked at habitat projects such as healthy shorelines, including reducing shoreline armoring.
Although we funded some great projects, including this one which looked at sea level rise vulnerability, I stepped down from all of these teams and committees at the beginning of 2022 because I found it increasingly improbable that we could grant-fund our way to recovery while continuing business as usual; because the teams contained too many state agency employees and not enough citizens; and because the phrase “when an organization has to choose between its mission and its survival, it will choose survival every time” had become a little too on the nose for the Puget Sound recovery community.
This year, I have the opportunity to serve again, and, curious to see what had changed, I’m doing so. I’m pleasantly surprised to find that both the composition of the team and the mission is different. The team is a blend of agency staff, non-profit representatives, consultants, and members of the public. The mission is no longer to rank projects, but instead to make recommendations to the next Strategic Initiative Leads, or SILs, staff from the Departments of Fish and Wildlife and Natural Resources, who will take over in 2026 and facing the possibility of working with severely diminished resources should the NEP funding turn into a pumpkin.
We are an unruly bunch, with decades of experience and strong opinions, and the leads who have to deal with us have my respect and sympathy. It’s taken half a dozen Zoom meetings and two in-person meetings, including one at the Seattle Aquarium, to reduce our list from over a hundred detailed items to a pithy document with a clear statement of our concerns and recommendations. I’m happy to recognize my fingerprints on a few items, including these:
How do we move beyond grant funding paradigms in restoration and protection?
Silos present in government and in the recovery community are sometimes at cross purposes and can work against each other. How do we address these structural challenges?
Build a climate resiliency lens into the implementation of every SIL activity.
Will it help? It’s too soon to tell, but it’s good to have a voice. The incoming teams can ignore these recommendations and do their own thing, but at least some long-overdue conversations are happening. There will be opportunities to stay engaged, and I plan to take advantage of them. I’ll be reporting back.
As a bonus, here I am on Whidbey Environmental Action Network’s podcast talking with Amanda Bullis about sea level rise.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll be back next week to bring you up to date on drinking water issues. To make sure you don’t miss it, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The tides here on the Chesapeake Bay are really big with those Kings-- our boatyard offices and rebuild facilities flood-- 6" of water to get to the restrooms...docks and electric way under. It's more real than anyone wants to admit. If you haven't seen the photos of Annapolis a few weeks ago, downtown really gets hit. Feet of water. Thanks for emphasizing the problem. ~J
“Paradoxically, since 2022, we’ve seen more real estate placed in harm’s way along our shorelines while local governments lack the political will to prevent it.” This is exactly what we’re seeing happening on Georgia’s coast too. Been happening for a while but it feels like it’s ramped up in the last handful of years. King tides, hurricanes, thunderstorm flooding… I’ll be pondering these same questions you pose here and pass them along to the nonprofit I work for doing this kind of work along our coast!