Living Shorelines Protect Coasts but Better Permitting Regulations Are Needed

Coastlines are increasingly threatened by impacts of severe storms, sea-level rise, flooding, erosion, and land loss. Without the proper shoreline protections in place, coasts will continue to degrade, putting human lives and livelihoods in harm's way.

Traditionally, strategies for curbing shoreline degradation have relied on ‘hard’ solutions—the construction of structures like bulkheads and seawalls. However, these solutions, while the dominant option for most of the 20^th century, have negative long-term impacts on the environment and economy, including coastal habitat degradation and high maintenance costs. By contrast, living shorelines or ‘soft’ solutions take a long-term and nature-based approach to ensuring shoreline stability.

A National Wildlife Federation report published last month, Softening our Shorelines: Policy and Practice for Living Shorelines Along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts, describes soft shoreline projects as a coastal management tool that relies “on natural and nature-based features, such as marshes, dunes, and oyster reefs” to provide shoreline protection while also providing ecological and community benefits.

“Although there has been progress in the adoption of these softer approaches in some states, the rate of living shoreline installation is still low relative to the amount of hardened shoreline protections,” the report states.

During EESI’s recent briefing on Southeast coastal resilience, experts cited permitting regulations and the lack of incentive programs as a few of the reasons why living shorelines projects are not as widely adopted. Ross Weaver, Program Assistant Director of Wetlands Watch, stated that increasing access to grants and permitting for sustainable shoreline projects can help increase their implementation.

In the United States, each coastal state is at a different stage of revising permitting regulations to be more inclusive of sustainable shoreline projects. Historically, state and federal governments have incentivized ‘hard’ structural shoreline protection strategies over living shoreline approaches. In an effort to provide more balanced incentives, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) adopted Nationwide Permit 54 in 2017 to make the process of implementing living shorelines easier.

According to the NWF report, some states have moved more quickly than others to enact policies on living shorelines. Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida are a few of the states leading the way. Of the 18 states analyzed in the report, only seven had an official definition of living shorelines in their formal regulations.

However, despite the challenges, living shorelines are gaining popularity in many communities. Heidi Stiller, the South Regional Director for the Office of Coastal Management of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), noted during EESI’s recent briefing that there are good trends promoting resilience.

“In North Carolina, living shorelines are now on equal footing with bulkheads in terms of permitting, so it is now just as easy to create a living shoreline as a bulkhead,” Stiller said.

To read more about states’ approaches to living shorelines and what can be done on the state and federal levels to advance climate adaptation through nature-based solutions, check out the NWF report and our coastal resilience briefings.

Author: Sydney O’Shaughnessy