Adapting to the changing landscape and massive ecosystem shifts of a world that is heating up rapidly is the most dramatic economic and social struggle in history, the executive director of The Center for Climate Integrity said Wednesday.
Richard Wiles was speaking at a telephone press conference introducing a report that he said conservatively estimated $400 billion in costs to coastal communities nationwide to deal with sea level rise in the next 20 years. Barnstable County ranked the highest in the state, and the third highest nationally, with an estimated $7.04 billion in estimated costs to protect public infrastructure from sea level rise.
“Communities are starting to engage, but there is a lack of enthusiasm when the costs are known,” said Curtis Spalding, former regional director of the Environmental Protection Agency in New England, who also spoke at the conference. A real estate transfer tax proposed by Gov. Charlie Baker would raise an estimated $1 billion in the next decade to help pay for climate change adaptations but barely scratches the surface of the need, Spalding said.
On Wednesday, the Baker-Polito administration announced another $12 million in grants to communities to prepare for climate change.
Skip Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch in Norfolk, Virginia, called it a “fiscal tidal wave, building along the coast.” His organization estimated needs for coastal Virginia at $40 billion.
“Where do we find the money?” asked Stiles, speaking at the teleconference. The federal government is looking at record deficits and the Army Corps of Engineers has a $98 billion backlog of projects nationally with a budget of between $4 billion and $5.5 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service. Stiles said the Federal Emergency Management Agency is oversubscribed.
Find out what climate costs will be in 2040
“We have flooded houses waiting for FEMA assistance, but if you’re on the list in Norfolk you will wait 188 years before you’ll get any funding,” Stiles said.
Plus, in states such as Virginia where there is resistance to climate change and mitigation, there is little help coming from the state, he said.
“The state of Virginia hasn’t put a dime into the state coastal resilience fund. There’s no money in it,” Stiles said.
Higher levels of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trap the heat of the sun, and that warms the ocean water. Water expands as it is heated, and global sea levels are expected to rise by between a foot and a little over 8 feet, according to a 2017 technical report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Regions such as the Northeast could see higher sea level rise because of a slowdown in a major current that transports cold water from Canada along the East Coast. The Cape has experienced 11 inches of sea rise since 1922, said Greg Berman of Woods Hole Sea Grant.
Massachusetts recently estimated that there was a 99.9% chance that sea rise by 2100 would not exceed 10 feet and an 85% chance it would not exceed 4 feet. The estimate for 2050 was 1½ to 3 feet.
Massachusetts and California are two states at the forefront nationally when it comes to coastal resilience planning and funding, said Rob Thieler, director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center. Thieler was a co-author of the 2017 NOAA report but was not part of Wednesday's panel.
“The Massachusetts Climate Change Adaptation Plan and the federal national climate assessments all point out there is value in looking at these problems sooner rather than later,” Thieler said.
The study previewed by the Center for Climate Integrity on Wednesday took a broad-brush approach to estimating costs. By analyzing maps and databases, engineers at Colorado-based Resilient Analytics cataloged public infrastructure such as roads, municipal buildings and parking lots vulnerable to sea level rise around the country and estimated the cost of building either a sea wall or revetment to protect them.
But the Cape and the state generallyhave looked to alternatives to building stone walls to protect roads and property.
Spalding said the expenses are roughly equivalent, but Berman said he thought the $7 billion figure to protect 404 miles of the 560-mile Barnstable County coastline seemed high. For all of Barnstable County there is an estimated $10 billion in property within the 100-year storm floodplain, but portions of that are above 20 feet, Berman said.
“But the overall story is accurate, that it is going to be very expensive to put in some armoring against the sea rise,” Berman said.
Wiles said the country’s fiscal outlook is different from when it built the 50,000 miles of the federal highway system almost 60 years ago. Then, the federal government paid $114 billion of the $129 billion tab, but he said there will be little money at the state or federal level and the expense of protecting public infrastructure from sea level rise largely will be borne by taxpayers and will fall especially hard on rural communities, where there are fewer people to pay taxes.
"The polluters are paying nothing," Wiles said. His Center for Climate Integrity and affiliated organizations often work in support of lawsuits in states such as Massachusetts and California that seek damages from what they call large polluters who they say understood the consequences of fossil fuel emissions but did not act on that knowledge.
— Follow Doug Fraser on Twitter: @dougfrasercct.
