Nature-based Resilience for Gulf Coast Communities

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The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) held a briefing on initiatives and partnerships that are helping protect Gulf Coast shorelines and communities from extreme weather events and other coastal hazards. The briefing showcased nature-based solutions that support coastal resilience, such as wetlands restoration and other “natural infrastructure,” as well as the “greening” of highways and other traditional “gray” infrastructure. This approach leverages the sustainable management and/or restoration of natural or modified ecosystems to protect people, communities, roadways, buildings, industries, and habitats. 

HIGHLIGHTS

• In this Congressional briefing, panelists discussed natural infrastructure as a promising method to make coastal communities more resilient to climate-related threats.
• Nature-based solutions are essential to any community’s infrastructure, and should be developed in conjunction with traditional ‘gray’ infrastructure.
• Since nature-based solutions protect coastal communities from environmental harm, they produce a range of co-benefits such as ecosystem health, economic activity, and recreational use.
• Numerous actors are already working to improve coastal resilience, including the panelists’ organizations: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services, the Gulf of Mexico Alliance, The Nature Conservancy, and the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association.
• Nevertheless, our coasts are still in need of swift and substantial action to prevent future damage from the extreme climate events that are increasingly common.

Representative Charlie Crist (D-FL)

• Rep. Crist, a former governor of Florida, noted the importance of coastal resilience to his state and district in Pinellas County on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
• On the Atlantic Coast, parts of Miami Beach have flooded without rain. Crist blamed these floods on rising sea levels.
• Crist also remarked that climate change is leading to increased storm intensity and used Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 storm which devastated the Florida Panhandle in 2018, as a case study.
• Crist, previously a Republican, emphasized that coastal resilience should not be a partisan issue and noted that many residents of coastal communities are acutely aware of the need for resilient planning and action.

Sarah Murdock, Director of U.S. Climate Resilience and Water Policy, The Nature Conservancy

• Murdock provided background about nature-based solutions and green infrastructure. Infrastructure is not limited to traditional ‘gray’ systems; natural systems are a form of infrastructure.
• Coastal communities are increasingly facing climate-related threats, and we should reduce these threats by conserving nature.
• In the urban context, increased rain events and flooding are the major threats. Some solutions to help absorb water and reduce runoff are:
  • Greening bioswales (bioswales concentrate or remove pollution and debris from runoff water)
  • Permeable pavement
  • Green roofs
  • Increased tree planting (trees absorb large quantities of water).
• In the riverine context, the major challenge is abating flood impacts. Some solutions include:
  • Reconnect river systems and allow a more natural flow of rivers
  • Set back levees to give rivers more room to expand when they overflow their banks
  • Enlarge culvert sizes (culverts are conduits that allow water to flow underneath a road, railroad, trail, or similar structure)
  • Remove dams that are no longer serving a useful function
• Investing in green infrastructure brings a host of additional co-benefits, such as ecosystem health, economic activity, and recreational use.

Samantha Brooke, Coastal & Marine Team Lead, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

• Coastal and Great Lake communities provide tremendous social and economic benefits to the United States.
  • Coastal areas are home to 30 percent of the U.S. population.
  • In 2015, $116 billion of U.S. GDP came from coastal tourism and recreation.
  • The coastal economy grew twice as fast as the overall U.S. economy in 2015.
• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is heavily involved in coastal ecosystem management.
  • 40 percent of National Wildlife Refuges are located in coastal areas.
  • 85 percent of migratory birds and waterfowl use coastal areas.
• The USFWS Coastal Program is a nation-wide, voluntary habitat restoration and protection program.
  • The program provides technical and financial assistance to coastal watershed conservation projects on public and private land, to increase coastal resilience and environmental well-being.
  • The program has existed since the mid-1980s, working with over 6,000 partners, restoring over 1.5 million acres of habitat, and leveraging over $1.6 billion for conservation.
  • Many projects restore natural services, such as wetlands for flood mitigation, or mangroves to reduce the impacts of storm surges and coastal erosion.
• Green infrastructure provides valuable and measurable resilience services to coastal communities. During Hurricane Sandy, coastal wetlands prevented more than $625 million in direct property damages by buffering coasts.
• Brooke featured a case study that the U.S. FWS Coastal Program is involved with: the Salt Bayou restoration (the largest contiguous tidal marsh in Texas at 90,000 acres).
  • Partners in restoration include private landowners, state, federal, and county staff, and non-profit organizations.
  • The Salt Bayou has been impacted by ship channels, oil and gas facilities, and road construction.
  • Resource managers became involved in Salt Bayou conservation discussions through community action agencies. It soon became apparent that there was no shared vision or overarching plan for the future of the region, without which resource managers could not provide a coordinated set of options for restoration. Discussion between stakeholders attempted to strike a balance between conflicting resource user groups.
  • Hurricane Francis in 1999 resulted in significant fish kills and flooding, spurring a recognition by stakeholders of a need for an integrated, high-level resilience plan.
  • Hurricane Ike devastated the region in 2008 prompting decisive action to conserve the Bayou.
  • The Salt Bayou Watershed Restoration Plan was completed in 2013. The plan includes four elements:
    • Hydrologic Restoration across the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway
    • Keith Lake Fish Pass Restoration
    • Beneficial Use of Dredged Material in Degraded Marshes
    • McFaddin Beach Ridge Restoration
  • For more information about the Salt Bayou project, Brooke referred the audience to the article, "No Jimmy Buffett here: Salt Bayou home to business, conservation"
  • Brooke emphasized that none of these projects can be completed with just one agency or organization, and the USFWS has partnered with many organizations to successfully restore and preserve habitat.

Rhonda Price, Deputy Director of the Office of Coastal Restoration and Resilience, Mississippi Department of Marine Resources; Mississippi Coastal Resilience Chair, Gulf of Mexico Alliance

• The Gulf of Mexico Alliance (GOMA) is a state-led network of Gulf Coast stakeholders that aims to enhance the ecological and economic health of the Gulf through regional collaboration.
  • Started in 2004 by then-governor of Florida Jeb Bush, in order to collaborate on common environmental and social issues shared by the Gulf Coast states.
  • Today, the governors of the five Gulf Coast States (Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas) make up the Board of GOMA.
  • The Alliance includes a Business Advisory Council with seven large Gulf Coast industries, and a Federal Advisory Group with 150 federal employees.
  • GOMA has so far used $2.3 million funding 45 projects, and 131 participating institutions.
• GOMA’s role is to:
  • Provide forums for collaboration on regional priority issues.
  • Develop tools and pilot projects to address regional issues.
  • Create strategic partnerships within the Gulf network.
• The Coastal Resilience Team assists Gulf Coast communities and states to become more resilient to natural and human-made hazards.
• The Coastal Resilience Team’s community approach works with homeowners to find alternatives to traditional infrastructure, such as living shorelines.
• By targeting resilience at the community level, the Team helps homeowners make their property more sustainable. In doing so, the municipality and the state become more sustainable and resilient.
• To further coordinate coastal action, the Regional Ocean and Coastal Coordination Act could enhance collaboration between stakeholders.

Derek Brockbank, Executive Director, American Shore & Beach Preservation Association (ASBPA)

• ASBPA is a community of practitioners dedicated to preserving, protecting, and enhancing US beaches and shoreline.
• Sediment is the building block of nature-based coastal resilience. Unfortunately, there is now a severe sediment shortage, because of the following factors:
  • Hardening riverbanks, channeling rivers, and building dams prevent sediment from moving to coasts.
  • Our current systems of flood protection exacerbate the sediment loss.
  • We are not putting sediment to good use, often wasting it in some areas and not using it where it is needed.
• The main solution is to manage sediment more effectively.
• Congress can support nature-based resilience through:
  • Making the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers more effective.
    • Change the understanding of the Army Corps’ “federal standard” of least cost disposal for dredged material. Such material is often dumped offshore (the cheapest option) rather than used where it is needed. The Corps should take into account longer term costs and benefits.
    • Reform the benefit-cost-ratio being used in analyses to take into account the multiple benefits of resilience projects.
  • Legislation:
    • Living Shorelines Act (H.R. 3115) funds living shoreline projects.
    • Coastal Communities Adaptation Act (H.R. 1317) creates a new, revolving fund for communities to complete nature-based resilience projects.
  • Sustained federal investment:
    • Fund appropriations on time.
    • Fund resilience efforts upfront, rather than only post-storm.
  • Commitment to infrastructure, people, and nature:
    • Nature-based infrastructure should be designed into any infrastructure bill.
    • Support the industries and communities that rely on coastal systems.

Questions

• Is it possible to get back the sediment that was pushed out to sea?
  
  When sediment is pushed offshore to water that is less than 600 feet deep, it is accessible. But when sediment is dumped in these areas, it is more costly in the long run because you will need to dredge it again later, when it is needed in low-sediment areas.

• What are the benefits and possible disadvantages to dredging?
  
  ASBPA does not take a position on whether dredging is needed for navigation in specific waterways. But where dredging is occurring, the sediment should be used beneficially. You might as well make use of the dredged sediment and put it into marshes and shorelines that need it.

• Should we continue developing shoreline areas?
  
  The government should make more funding and resources available to vulnerable communities that no longer want to live on shorelines through the FEMA buyout program. In many cases, low-income households cannot afford to move, so rebuilding, even after being flooded 30 times, is the only option.

• Do you see pre-disaster mitigation funding flowing into nature-based resilience development?
  
  FEMA invests in risk-reduction mitigation. Thanks to the Disaster Recovery Reform Act (2018), FEMA is making more money available to pre-disaster mitigation efforts.

• How do shoreline ecosystems respond to and recover from storms?
   

  It would appear that nature-based infrastructure survives storms more successfully than gray infrastructure, but more research is needed.

  From The Nature Conservancy’s anecdotal evidence, we see natural systems take a short-term hit after a disaster, but then come back to health fairly quickly.

 

Government agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Department of Transportation, are piloting and implementing nature-based infrastructure projects in the Gulf Coast and around the country. Such projects can be more cost effective and durable against extreme weather events than gray infrastructure, while providing additional health, environmental and economic benefits. The panelists described how national, regional, state and local governments and organizations are collaborating to integrate nature-based solutions into policy and practice.

The Gulf Coast states face a diverse set of coastal challenges, including sea level rise, land subsidence, coastal erosion, flooding, more intense hurricanes, and warmer ocean waters, which adversely impact fisheries. As a result, the Gulf Coast region has served as an incubator for nature-based infrastructure projects that provide both models and "lessons learned" for coastal resilience efforts in other regions of the country. The briefing provided specific project examples, such as using dredged material from ports to rebuild wetlands along Louisiana’s coast and restoring a marsh in Salt Bayou, Texas, to protect both homes and industry from storm surges.

Panelists addressed how Congressional appropriations and potential infrastructure legislation can integrate nature-based solutions to support the long-term sustainability of the country’s coastal infrastructure.