 Welcome to the Legal Aspects of Coastal Adaptation and Resilience in Rhode Island, a workshop for municipal solicitors and planners. I'm Julia Wyman, I'm the Director of the Marine Affairs Institute here at the Law School. I'm also the Director of the Rhode Island Sea Grant Legal Program. The Marine Affairs Institute is a partnership of Roger Williams University School of Law, University of Rhode Island, and Rhode Island Sea Grant Legal Program. Since I do have a little bit of a captive audience of attorneys in the room, I'm gonna have to give a plug for our wonderful Sea Grant Law Fellow Program, where we take second and third year law students and we match them up with outside organizations that have a question of marine law or policy. You're gonna hear from one of our fabulous law fellows later today and some of the great research he's done. There's also information outside about the program and I'll be here all day. So if you have some projects that you potentially would like a student to work on, please connect with me. One of our missions at the Marine Affairs Institute is to educate young marine law and policy professionals. Another one of our missions is to educate the public on ocean and coastal issues that matter to us as the ocean state. And it is that reason that we're here today. I'm really glad that you all have chosen to be with us instead of in Paris, the Climate Change Summit today. I know it was a really difficult choice, but you've chosen well. As I drove in listening to NPR this morning, they had a little piece on how municipal planners were noticeably absent from the attendance at the Paris Summit. And I thought don't worry NPR, we got this one. At least for Rhode Island. So this workshop came out of the beach stamp process. We've been talking about having this workshop for about a year now, and really the questions that were coming up during some of the community meetings that we had for the beach stamp process were related to different liabilities that potential municipalities might have as we start adapting to climate change. So this workshop is an attempt to answer that. Through some of our Rhode Island Sea Grant funding, we were able to hire Dennis Esposito and our law fellow John Ryan Henry to look at some of those aspects. So we're gonna share some of their research and some of the research of the beach stamp team as a whole today, but we also really wanna hear from you. So we're hoping that today will be an open dialogue and that we'll use it as a springboard for more conversations about how we can help you as planners and solicitors start to really think about climate change adaptation in your planning. So our session at 345, Teresa Creen and I will be moderating, and we're really hoping to get some feedback. So please do stick around for that. I'd like to thank our beach stamp team for the whole process of coming up with some of these questions that we're gonna try to grapple with today. But I'd also like to thank the folks that really planned today. So we have Teresa Creen from the Coastal Resources Center in Rhode Island Sea Grant. We have Dennis Esposito from Roger Williams University School of Law and the Rhode Island Sea Grant legal program. And we have Grover Fugate and Brian Goldman from the Coastal Resources Management Council that all came together to put together the program that we have. I'd also like to thank our program coordinator, Charlotte Ferris, and our program and events executive director, Chelsea Horne, for helping do all the other little parts of the day aside from programming and our wonderful speakers. It's my pleasure now to introduce to you one of the Marina Ferris Institute's greatest supporters, the Dean of our law school, Michael Yilnowski who's gonna welcome you to the law school. Thank you. So this is another set of welcomes and thank yous. And it's true. I'm a sucker for the Marina Ferris Institute. I was here when it was birthed and it's been an absolute pleasure to watch it grow and become what it is today. And I look forward to continued growth in the future under Julia's leadership. It's terrific to have her back. It really warms my heart to see the list of collaborators across the top of the program for today. It's important to break down the silos if we're gonna solve complex problems and as I think everybody who's in this room knows, what you've been doing, what you've been thinking about doing is very closely connected to what's going on in Paris. But you're there on the ground dealing with the real impacts now and will be on the ground hopefully. Dealing with the impacts in the future. So my hats off to you for being proactive about this issue, not being in denial about it and coming together to try to solve it. And I think the ocean state is ahead of the game in terms of dealing with and planning for these issues. So I just wanna say a special thank you to our partners in the Marine Affairs Institute. Julia mentioned them, the Rhode Island Sea Grant legal program and the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography. As Julia mentioned, there are sort of two, there are several pieces of the Marine Affairs Institute but there are two that I just wanna highlight today. One is our joint degree program with URI, a JD MMA program with the Graduate School of Oceanography. And as Julia mentioned, you'll be hearing from one of those, a current student in that program later today. This is another great example I think of collaboration that doesn't generally happen, right? We've got a private institution and a public institution coming together to offer to students something that is not available to them in most other parts of the country and we've attracted terrific students and we've graduated terrific professionals who are out there doing terrific things. The other unique aspect of the Marine Affairs Institute is the Sea Grant Law Fellows program which permits students while they are in law school to take on real problems through the legal programs extension service and to work under the supervision of Julia and her team and deliver real product that is helpful to the community and that helps the students get the kinds of real practice experience that are so essential to really understanding how this area of law works. So I wanna thank you all for all you do for us and I want to welcome you all here today. I hope you have a terrific day. I'm confident that you will and with that, well, actually there's one other thing I need to do for those of you who know that I am a tweeter, I need to take a picture from behind the podium. Because the pictures of the people at the podium are very common, you know? And they don't. So thank you very much, have a great day. We're ready to dive right in. Before we get started with our first speaker, I just wanna point out that the restrooms are out the door to the left. There's also a water fountain there if you need it at all throughout the day. We have arranged for food to primarily be out there all day long. So there's breakfast right now. There'll be a break after we hear from Grover where there'll be more coffee. We'll have coffee throughout the day and we'll have lunch, so you will be very well fed. Yes, so our first speaker today is someone that you all know, Grover Fugate, the executive director of the Coastal Resources Management Council. He has been the director for 31 years and has been responsible for overseeing the development of all policies and programs for the state's coastal program. He's currently the project manager of the council's new shoreline change special area management plan which is a forward-looking plan on how climate change is impacting Rhode Island's shoreline and developing appropriate responses to the threat and protecting the state's coastal infrastructure. Due to his leadership with the OceanSamp project and other coastal planning efforts, Fugate has earned several significant awards including the prestigious 2010 Susan Snow-Cotter Award for Excellence in Ocean and Coastal Resource Management from NOAA. He's also the recipient of the 2010 Regional Sea Grant Outstanding Outreach Award and the 2008 Coastal America Award for Habitat Restoration and obviously the most important one on here, the 2008 Rhode Island Sea Grant Lifetime Achievement Award. In addition to his duties as executive director, he also serves as the state co-lead to the Ocean Planning Initiative in the Northeast Regional Ocean Council and is also the state co-lead for the regional planning body established under President Obama's executive order on the National Ocean Policy. Fugate is the author of academic journal articles on coastal and natural resources management issues and his adjunct faculty at the University of Rhode Island in the Marine Affairs Program. He's also a guest lecturer here at the law school on coastal and marine law and he is going to welcome us to the entire topic we are devoting today to. Thank you Grover. I'm going to break after this talk. So we have Paris going on right now and hopefully they come to some sort of agreement and hopefully Congress doesn't step in the way of that but that isn't going to solve our problems. Unfortunately, we've got a lot of momentum that's in the system already and I'm going to explain some of that here in a second. So even if we went to zero emissions today, we're going to continue to see some of that chugged through the system for the next several centuries at least. So hence why we're focused on this at the council. By the way, we have two council members here today. We have our chair and Livingston and our vice chair Paul Lamont are here. The council actually pushed and wanted to initiate this planning process almost a full year before Sandy, Hurricane Sandy that is in Rhode Island. It was only a tropical storm and still had that much devastating damage along our south shore. So one of the things that the council wanted to do was sort of step back and take a look at what was happening with climate change and particularly focusing in on three threats and these were going to be sea level rise, surge from storms, whether they'd be tropical such as hurricanes or extra tropical, such as nor'easters and also erosion that comes with that. So we are seeing changes already in our natural environment. Changes really that should be occurring over geologic time scales and they're occurring within our lifetime. Some of them occurring in less than a decade which is frightening. In fact, as the scientists go to model the system, the system's actually changing faster than they can model it. The other sort of scary thing about that is that the system response is usually worse than what the models are showing. So it's a brave new world for us. In terms of sea level rise, we actually for the last 2000 years up until the period of about the 1850s have had essentially zero sea level rise. From about the 1850s on, we started to see some uptick in that and as you can see the projections depending on what scenarios you're looking at are quite large as we go forward. So our entire civilization has developed essentially with zero sea level rise and now we're in an environment where it has increased starting to increase in an accelerated fashion and we're gonna have to deal with those changes. Sea level rise comes from a number of sources and one of the important things to realize about sea level rise is that we can have global sea level rise but what's really important to us is the relative sea level rise. In other words, what's happening at our particular location. So there are factors that can add in or subtract from what you might see on the global scale and impact us here to, in our case, a greater extent than what we would see within the global estimates. And these are some of the sources of it and there's a few sources on here that actually aren't on this. One of them, for instance, is the ice masses so that would be Greenland or Antarctic exert their own gravitational field and gravity holds water. So they're holding water up against those ice masses as they start to lose their mass through melting. They lose the ability and their loss of gravitational pull and start to release some of that water and I'll show you what some of the estimates are here in a second. So this is a graph showing temperature from the global mean, which is the zero, that blue line as you see going across. And for the last 10,000 years, we've had a pretty good period where we've had stable temperature, essentially. We've had a few upticks, a few downticks within it but pretty stable. But that right now is seizing and we're on an uptick in terms of what we're gonna see for temperature. In Paris, what they're hoping to do is try to ratchet things back to keep it at about two degrees Celsius. Two degrees Celsius is one of those magic numbers that scientists at least think potentially is a tipping point for us. If we go beyond two degrees centigrade, we're gonna be in a catastrophic era. Right now, we're gonna be in a very difficult era but hopefully we can ratchet that back. And it all has to deal with this. So this is looking at several factors here and it's over the last 400,000 years. So these measurements were actually taken from ice cores and there have been a series of cores that have been taken and then this correlates back with what each of those cores are saying. But essentially, they can estimate the CO2 concentration from the ice cores, the gas bubbles that are in the ice cores. And what you can see is that CO2 has been up and down over these last 400,000 years but if you look towards present time, it is that little bit on the end that is of concern to us. We've never been there before within the last 400,000 years. So those that say it's a natural cycle, it's occurring, it is a natural cycle but not to the extent that we're seeing right now in this period. What happens is when you rise CO2, and this is physics, this isn't something that's a theory or whatever in terms of the responses you see. These are pretty well known responses. So when you raise temperature, you obviously, I mean when you pump CO2 in, you have a CO2 effect with greenhouse gas, you start to raise the atmospheric temperature and as you raise the atmospheric temperature, you start to see sealable rise go. So what you have is as you have CO2, you pump that into the atmosphere, eventually you'll see a response in the atmospheric temperature. And then behind that, you will eventually see a response and sealable rise. There are lags that are built into the system. So that's why I say even if we go to zero today, we're gonna continue to see sealable rise for the next several hundred years because what's already built into the system. There's been some recent papers coming out on West Antarctic for instance that indicates that what we've got baked into the system already will lead to about four feet of sealable rise just from that on top of the other global estimates that they're talking about coming out of the IPCC for another three. So it doesn't take a genius to figure out the math on that one. The other interesting thing is that sealable rise in the geologic past has not been this graph that sort of goes up. We get what we call meltwater pulses. So you can see two large swings in the graph there. One is meltwater pulse A and one is meltwater pulse B. These are where you get ice sheets that have catastrophic failures, large scale losses, and suddenly cause a sudden rise within sealable. So it's not gonna be necessarily this slow gradual response. We might see meltwater pulses occur within the system and where you might see a foot within several decades of sealable rise rather than the 10 inches that we've had over the almost last 90 years. And we're already starting to see swings in the sealable rise rates. You can see these are global mean sealable change and as you start to draw the regression lines through them, you can see that there are starting to see increases in the steepness of those lines which is an acceleration component. So this is what I was talking about in terms of the loss of mass and gravitational pull on sealable rise and that little diagram down on the lower left is sort of trying to illustrate that. The sort of counterintuitive thing though is that this addition of water to the system is not gonna be uniform. There will be certain areas of the world that will experience a greater rise and sealable rise as this mass is starting to disintegrate and releasing that water. And if you look in the diagram in the right-hand side, you're gonna see these are the estimated rates from that and we in the East Coast, particularly in the Northeast are sort of the winners in this game in terms of getting the most out of all this. So there's some other things to consider as we go forward and we still don't know a lot of what's going on. The science is still developing. There are new discoveries every day and the estimates keep going up on us. These are some of the studies that are out there that are looking at and trying to use geologic pass as sort of a predictor for the future but as you can see, some of these numbers are staggering. If we start to look at some of this, it's got severe implications obviously for not only here in Rhode Island but all throughout the world. And one of the great unknowns that we're still trying to deal with and figure out is methane. Most of what you see, all the estimates obviously are dealing with CO2 and the carbon that's coming out of our burning of these fossil fuels but methane is also another one and there's a number of sources of methane that have nothing to do with the burning of fossil fuels per se directly, indirectly yes but there are methane hydrates for instance in the Arctic. This is actually somebody that's lighting a fire in Siberia from a lake where the methane's coming up through. There's actually several industrious persons that have taken and harvested this and use it to heat their homes but methane as we start to melt the permafrost will be released as a result of that. Also if we start to activate methane hydrates within the Arctic as a result of the melting polar ice we will start to see a greater contribution of methane in this game. So it's one of the unknowns that we really don't know about yet. So what happens with sea level rise? Well sea level rise can precipitate a number of changes to this and these are just some of the ones that are out there the major ones obviously. We often see erosion increased with as we have storms because we have a higher elevation now giving those storms an added boost in terms of being able to push things around. If the sea level rise change gets too great we'll see threshold crossings where systems will essentially be gone and lost but we're already starting to see many of these. We're seeing shifts within our fishery population that are already moving east and north. We're seeing a loss of wetlands in this state that is just absolutely dramatic. We're seeing species that we're starting to lose in some of the restoration efforts that we're focusing in on the marsh are actually targeted at some of these species. So there's a number of changes that are out there just from sea level rise itself. And we're already starting to see this. This is down in the Watch Hill area. This is the Watch Hill Yacht Club. That water is a pretty much a daily event for high tides and the source of that water is a storm drain. That's in the parking lot that's now acting as a tidal conduit rather than allowing the storm water to drain out through it. The Watch Hill Yacht Club in fact was just approved by us to elevate that structure to get it up out of there because they're starting to have severe problems with their operations. In fact, they're kitchens on wheels so they can get it out of there during some of these events. This is an estimate now that's available online in terms of what the sea level rise estimates are. You can do this by the primary gauges here in Rhode Island. Our primary gauge that we use the most is Newport. And they're also available for the Providence area too. But right now what the council is going out to regulation with is we used to have a static estimate of three to five feet by 2100. 2100 doesn't really give a lot of meaning to people because it seems so far out that they sort of lose touch with it. So we're shifting to a more dynamic estimate and we're using the actual data coming out of NOAA and we're using the upper boundary that NOAA has. One, because we want to be conservative on it, but two, all the data right now is lining up on that line. So we're using that line. Just to give you an idea and the numbers that come out of this give you a level of preciseness that I think really doesn't exist. But NOAA, for instance, by 2100 is estimating depending on the reference point that you use 6.5 to 6.8 feet by 2100 here. We're expecting about a foot of sea level rise within the next 20 years and three, two to three by 2050. As I said, we've had 10 inches of sea level rise over the last 90 years and so you can see we're starting to have a jumping point where we're gonna see a lot more changes in the system. And what we've been doing is developing this and I'm gonna let others go into more graphic presentation on this, but we've developed some tools and one of this is storm tools. And this just gives you sort of an idea of what the sea level rise estimates do in terms of the game changes that we're gonna see. Our five foot estimate now, as I just told you, is an under estimate. So this is five feet of sea level rise for downtown Providence and this is just sea level rise. There's no surge on this. So the reason I'm showing sea level rise is because the hurricane barrier does not deal with sea level rise. It does nothing for it. So if you do seven feet, that's what happens. So the financial district essentially down in downtown Providence is threatened by that and we're gonna have to try to figure out how to respond to that. So we're already seeing many impacts, as I've said from this. We're seeing sea level rise. We're seeing increased precipitation, the 2010 floods, for instance, on our example of that. We're seeing ocean acidification starting to occur and that is a concern because of the way that it can affect the food chain all the way down to the various levels, all the way up through the food chain. We're seeing species shift, as I said and there's the potential for both the intensity of storms to increase as we go into this and also the frequency of these storms to increase. Along with the storms and sea level rise, we obviously get erosion and as we are already starting to see, we have this year we're running a deficit in our water but you can expect to see, even though we've got these flashy events in terms of precipitation, potentially more droughts during the summer period. Just to show you that we are already seeing changes I wanted to just give you a little few or a couple of pictures here of our shoreline just so that you can see as it goes through progression of time. We've had some pretty dramatic changes already. This is Browning Cottages, it's down in the South Kingston area. As you can see in 1972, those are the historic cottages down there. They had a very healthy beach out in front of it, nice dune system. As you can see by 2007, they're already starting to show some problems associated with the erosion there. That's the day after Sandy. Most of these cottages are gone now. In fact, there's only one left. And they had to relocate and move back. We have indicated to them that they are likely to become an island and that if another storm comes, they may actually go themselves. The response of the homeowners, and this is what we deal with every day, was they said as long as they got 10 years out of it, they were okay with it. These homes are several million dollars. So that's the type of issues that we're dealing with. This is the town beach in South Kingston. I want you to pay attention to that beach pavilion there. As you can see, it had a very healthy beach out in front of it. There was a series of boardwalks and walkways that were out there. And that's the day after Sandy. So once again, all that beach, all those boardwalks are gone and the erosion was up underneath the structure right now. Thank you. This area since 1950 has lost about 380 feet of beach, just to give you an idea. Salt Marsh, as I said, the dramatic losses we're seeing are just sort of breathtaking because these are supposed to occur over geologic time. And as you can see, we're going from 2004 to 2010, six years and a complete loss of that marsh system. The marshes are essentially drowning in place. They can't keep up with sea level rise. At least the rates we're seeing right now. Also, this has profound impacts for how we look at development. So this is the Charleston Beach area the day after Sandy. As you can see, we have our erosional feature here. This is where we usually start to measure from in terms of setbacks for building. So we would be using that line there. In our program, we have a minimum right now, a minimum 50 foot setback. So they're not supposed to encroach within 50 feet if they want to develop or redevelop. So we have the property line in the back and those lines right now are less than 50 feet, which means the next storm, they will not likely to be allowed to rebuild as a result of this. In addition, structures that are being built today as sea level rises will act higher the next storm on those structures. And what we're gonna see is we're gonna see these wave envelopes start to act upon these structures. So if you've got a three foot wave on a building, it's going down. In fact, you'll do major structural damage all the way down to about 1.5 feet on the wave. So if you build to today's standard and we continue to see the sea level rise, you're actually gonna be below BFE. Again, to give you a new example with the current sea level rise estimates that we're seeing today. Within the 30 year mortgage period, a house that's built today will be below BFE by the time it reaches the end of its mortgage period because we're expecting a foot within the next 20 years. Typical mortgage is 30 years, so it will be below BFE. As we start to go forward in time, we're not gonna be able to afford the catastrophic losses that we're seeing with these storms. Biggered water, it's already starting to move to full actuarial rate. My guess is that it will have to continue to adjust to that in order to finance the system. Congress made a major shift after Hurricane Katrina. The flood insurance program when it was originally created was dealt or built to deal with average losses during the year. It was not meant to deal with catastrophic storms. Katrina comes along and Congress changes the game and says they can borrow money now, but Congress will not cover the loss, which means they are behind the eight ball out of the gate. They owe something like $30 billion right now. At their current payback rate, it will take them about 100 years without another storm. So as you can see, the numbers aren't going to add up and they're gonna have to deal with it and do something with it. So if you build it today standard, you may be below BFE and suddenly facing huge increases within your insurance rates. So the council, as I said, back a full year before Sandy decided to grapple with this problem and start to look at it in a proactive fashion. And we're looking at this through this lens of trying to get new data and information and develop some of the best tools that we can possibly have. And we're way ahead of the rest of the nation in this, I can tell you right now. We're using outreach and communication to convey that information to the public and also to planners and agencies. And then what we're also looking at is then trying to develop the policies and tools to try to deal with that. All that will feed into the Shoreline Change Sam or as we affectionately call it, the Beach Sam. This is some of the things that got us interested as we started to get into this. And this is the new flood insurance maps that just came out. And so what you can see is these were the old maps here and you can see we had 16 and 18, 13 back here. The red is a V zone, meaning that it's a velocity zone, meaning that you've got a wave envelope there. That means you have to build on piles in order to elevate the structure and get out of the wave surge. So when FEMA redid the maps, now think of this, the only change in the database between this set of maps and this set of maps was Sandy. And what did FEMA do? They lowered the firms. In other words, they lowered the elevation of what they thought the surge was gonna be, bringing it down three feet on this house shore. That took out areas that used to be V zones over here into A zones, which means you can build on the ground surface and you can see the difference here. Now, as we started to look into the maps, you see things like this. So you're going from 22 feet here to 14 feet here along this line as a physical impossibility. So we started to analyze that and get into it. As a result, FEMA has been making a number of errors. And here in the Northeast, and we're the only region in the country that does this, we're using a methodology, or FEMA's using a methodology that was from 1973. We're not using the latest science that's out there. And part of that whole change in maps has to deal with the uncertainty that's out here with our storm. So if we look at our storm history in Rhode Island, and we do this on what's called a return analysis, these are our storms. And as you can see, most of them line up down in this area, meaning that they're very small storms. We have three large events. We have 2012, 54, and 38. But as you can see, the 38 event out here creates this large uncertainty. Used to be our belief that the 38 event was about a 100-year storm event. Turns out it's actually probably closer to a 200-year event in terms of the return period analysis that's been done. What does FEMA use? Well, when FEMA goes to develop the maps, they don't use the mean, thankfully, because the mean would be essentially you're wrong half the time and you're right half the time. FEMA has no discussion of uncertainty within their maps or their documents at all. They're absolutely certain about this. And they use this point here, which is halfway between the mean and the upper 95% confidence interval. So as a result of the way that they fit that curve, this one here, they change the methodology by which they fit the curve for this extreme analysis out here. And that's what led to the map changes. And then lowering the firms. I'm gonna show you here in a second, but we went and have taken and captured the latest modeling. Turns out that FEMA was not off by three feet. They're more like four to five feet that they're off on these. At least in the South Shore, in the upper bay, they've actually overestimated the threat. So as I said, what we're looking at here is we're looking at this progression here. And what we've got is we've got what's called the still water elevation. And then we've got the wave envelope that's on top of that. As the wave envelope starts to come in, it obviously diminishes. And then ultimately you reach this back here, which is the back of the A zone. On the other side of that is the X zone. So what we're trying to do is figure out what this progression is for the Rhode Island shoreline right now. But on this out shore, this number here has been underestimated, grossly underestimated. So we've developed a series of maps. And again, there's gonna be a greater explanation of this, but one of the maps that we developed is a mapping tool called storm tools. And this just shows you the lineup. So these are the FEMA maps on the right side. And these are our maps for various return period analysis. The backside, as you can see, we tend to show more flooding in many of the areas that have been depicted on these maps than FEMA does as a result of us using the 95% confidence interval. The reason we do that is because if you're going to build critical infrastructure, hospitals, police stations, fire stations, those types of things, we wanna be 95% correct or certain that the flood levels will not exceed that. We don't wanna be right half the time. We wanna be right most of the time. Now the other sort of interesting thing is that we talk about the 100 year event or the 1% storm that is that it has a 1% chance of occurring at any one point in time. This is out of the Army Corps publication that just came out recently and it's on Coastal and River flooding, but it talks about cumulative probabilities. So when you start to look at a 100 year storm, it actually has a 26% chance of occurring within a 30 year mortgage period. So as you start to look at cumulative probabilities, it changes the picture. The other interesting thing about sea level rise is it can change the return period analysis. So as we start to get sea level rise, what it does is it jumps the storms. So with five foot old sea level rise, that's essentially like having a 1938 event or a 100 year storm every day. So there's some complex relationships here that are very difficult sometimes to get your head around that we need to deal with as we go forward. After Hurricane Sandy, the Corps was actually given $20 million after the sequester and ended up being about 19 million to engage in one of the largest modeling efforts ever undertaken. And what they did is they started to develop a modeling grid system for the, as you can see for the Gulf and the entire East Coast. Then what they did is they ran those models and they ran them for the storms they had. Then they did what is used in the modeling system is called synthetic storms. So what they did is they took real storms and they started to play with the parameters of those storms and then run the model again. They ultimately developed a model database that has about 1,000 both real and synthetic storms in it as well as that is hurricanes and 100 northeasters in that database. These models took the largest supercomputers they have and ran them for months in order to crank this data. Then what they did is they saved this at save points along the shoreline. So as the model gave a result for that particular storm, they gave that model result and dumped it in a save point at particular locations along the shoreline. This is the grid for Rhode Island that the Corps had. We have actually taken and grabbed this grid and brought it in. It's running and operational at the University of Rhode Island. And these are the Army Corps save points for Rhode Island. So as you can see, there's an incredible density here. We pestered the hell out of the Corps to make sure that we got good data. They have 18,000 points for that entire area from the Gulf all the way up to the Atlantic up to the border of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia. We have 1,000 alone in Rhode Island for our shoreline. So what we've done now is we had this tremendous effort that's been undertaken, modeling capability that is beyond anything that we've ever had in the past. But for most states and most municipalities to be able to utilize that is beyond their means. So what we've done is we brought it in, got it operational and running, and we're using fully coupled models of both ADCIRC, which gives us a still water and ST wave, which estimates the wave envelope on top of that. So we're running a series of simulations. As you can see, we've imported all this within to the system itself and we've been doing return period analysis for our entire shoreline. Ultimately, we are using that to develop new firms to look at this and we're in negotiations right now with FEMA to try to get them to buy into the new firms. And what we're doing is trying to develop data that is specific to our shoreline and not generic as they've done. So these are the models. These are the ST wave predictions and as you can see, the features offshore, there's incredibly high resolution with this model and allows us to estimate what storms are capable of doing right now. You can also see the breach ways and where breaches would occur in these events through the coloration along the shoreline there and you can see the impacts of that. You can also see wave refraction that's occurring and it's just an incredible amount of data. The other thing that we see is we see the impact of the narrowing and the ledge that's here in terms of the impact on the wave environment up here, the upper bay. So this is where we're getting the ability to look at those FEMA floodplain maps and showing that they've actually overestimated the impacts up here in many areas. This is Block Island and so what you can see is the wave refraction that's occurring here. As the waves come around, this is what these features are here. So again, incredibly high resolution models that will give us a lot of information as we start to go forward. As part of that, what we've done is we've developed our storm tools maps that you're gonna see here later on. We've also developed a return period analysis for waves and what we've done is wherever these save points are, we have a complete analysis of what the waves are for various return events now. So our permitting people can start to use this to look at these and look at for what we look at, our engineers tend to look at is return events. So a 25 year storm, 50 year storm, 100 year storm and then what they do is measure these events for that and then design looking at those. So this is just showing one of the maps and storm tools with the wave period analysis and what you can do is click on any one of these points and it will give you what the waves are for that particular area. Also as part of this, the researchers have been looking at and working with artificial intelligence and what they call neural network modeling. This is essentially where the model has some algorithms written into it so it can start to teach itself how to model. So what that does is they actually take these parameters here, put it in the model, the model runs it, predicts what the surge is, compares it to what the actual surge is within the database and then starts to go back and play with the parameters to see if it can better predict that and it keeps on making runs until it starts to figure out how to predict these events. So this is the set here. What you can see is this is the dataset that was used to test the system for the model to start to learn and then this is the validation system. They use the database, the storms that weren't used in teaching the model to validate the model and as you can see there's a very tight correlation here. You've got an R coefficient of 0.94, pretty damn tight. So what we did is then we then used the model to compare it against real storms and as you can see it did very well except for 2012. The reason 2012 wasn't predicted that well is because 2012, Sandy had both elements of a tropical and extra tropical and the model wasn't taught to deal with extra tropicals. It's meant to run on tropicals. If we look at our shore here, we're essentially dominated by tropical storms that is hurricane events. If we go north of the Cape, it turns and it shifts so that the North, the Cape area up in here is dominated by extra tropicals or northeasters. What we're also doing is we're working and there's a proposal into NOAA right now to come up with real-time surge forecasting for Rhode Island. There are all the institutions in the New England area have put in on a proposal through Naracus which is the Northeast Regional Ocean Observing System. And they've got a proposal in to use FVCOM which is another model that's out there to estimate real-time surge. This is actually an operational model that's predicting surge right now for the National Weather Service for Situat and a couple of places within New Hampshire. And the proposal is to expand that system all the way through the New England area and for the entire shoreline of Rhode Island. The modeling gives us the ability to do simulations or what-if analysis. And it gives us a tremendous capability now to look at various types of events and see what those events might do to our shoreline. Then we can start to play with the system. We can say, okay, what if we put a seawall here? What would that do? Or if we were to put a or require elevation in certain areas, what would that do in terms of the surge and the damage that might occur from that? So we're really starting to build that type of capability now. The tools, what we're developing now is we're developing a series of tools and we develop these for ourselves. But because we make the same land use decisions essentially as municipalities on whether to allow development or not, these tools, we realized, had a tremendous applicability to municipal or state operations themselves. So we've been trying to package these and roll these out so that they're available to all sorts of individuals within the municipality to help them make decisions or plan and prepare for certain events. We're developing a bunch of new tools as a result of that. Some of them you're gonna hear more detail today such as storm tools. Storm tools has the ability to not only map where the surge extent's gonna be. It also gives you sea level rise and also gives you the depth of these storms as you'll hear in a second. We're looking at and redoing our shoreline change maps. What we're finding is that when we started to look at the erosion rates that we were actually seeing and our predictions, our predictions were underestimating in certain areas, grossly underestimating in some areas. In the Matunik, for instance, area, we were about half of what the actual erosion rate is right now. Matunik is going away at about four feet a year. So we changed our methodology. We've updated the maps. We're going through and we've doubled the density of the transects and we're broken this shoreline up into smaller segments to give us a more realistic picture of what's going on. And for the first time, we've actually captured Block Island. Block Island was an anomaly that was left sort of out there because nobody wanted to touch it because the bluff erosion is very difficult to estimate and deal with. So we're capturing that now. So these are a look at what the new maps are going to be. These lines you see here are old shorelines and there will be a key that will be off here that will tell you what those shorelines are. But the red one, for example, is the 1939 shoreline. So that gives you an idea of what the shoreline used to look like and then what you have is a series of cells here that give you the total estimate or the total loss that's occurred during that period and what the projected erosion rate is. These projected erosion rates are probably good for about the next 50 years. There's some modeling that's going on and some science that's going on right now that if we would continue on the current path says that those rates may change significantly beyond 50 years. What we're also doing is then trying to project what our shoreline would look like. So this is the actual loss here. This would be this new shoreline back here. What we're gonna be doing actually is imposing the setback envelope on this because this sort of gives you the impression that you can build right next to this red line, which you can't. So we're gonna put the setback envelope on these maps as well so that we can give planners and particularly our projected shorelines of what we're looking at as we go into the future. On these maps also, you're gonna see what's here as they've been putting in is surge along with sea level rise. And you can see the depths here are on the bottom. So that estimates what the surge in that particular area would be with a five foot sea level rise. There's been nourishment projects that occur in the state because one of the big things everybody says is nourishment's the answer. Well, we're looking at one that was done by the Army Corps, was done after Sandy. They brought in about 100,000 cubic yards of sand on that beach. We've been monitoring it ever since and you can see the response of the system. In this area here, it's almost gone back to its pre-nourishment condition within this short period of time. So we're trying to understand the dynamics associated with that as we go forward. We do not have an abundance of sand in our system and we certainly don't have an abundance of sand in the offshore environment like New Jersey or some of these other southern states. They're going and capturing in the tens of millions of cubic yards of material in their offshore environment. We just don't have that. So we're not gonna be able to undertake those massive nourishment projects here. What we're also working on right now is we've gotten funding to start to proof out a concept called the Coastal Environmental Risk Index. This will be a combination index that will look at sea level rise, surge, erosion, waves. So we're gonna combine those factors and start to rank the shoreline. In addition, what we have the capability now with that model is to go back and estimate what the damage is going to be for each particular structure. So what we're gonna be able to do is run the model and start to look at damaged scenarios from various storms. Then we can, as I said, play with the policy assumptions. If we require elevation, what will that do in terms of the damage in that particular area? What's the cost-benefit ratio associated with that? So it gives us the ability to start to look at these things in a very detailed, very sensible economic fashion that nobody else really has at this point. One of the projects that we worked on and has been working on for a number of years and just completed and adopted is the slam or sea level rise affecting marsh migration. As sea level rises, there's two impacts that we see with salt marshes. Sometimes they're drowning in place. Other times they're starting to progress over the landscape. And what these maps do is it's a parcel-by-parcel analysis that allows us to project into the future what marsh response is gonna be, whether it will disappear or whether it will continue to migrate. That's very important because if we're trying to preserve marshes and provide for the migration, we need to know where that can occur. So there's been a report that's been produced. It's on our website just to give you a highlight of some of the analysis. The towns with the four largest losses are here. All South County towns, no surprise. And you can see for the various sea level rise scenarios what those estimated losses will be. Again, that's a report that's on our website. So this is what we're seeing around the state. We're seeing these areas where this used to be marsh, now converted into these essentially algal pans that are out on the marsh itself. And we're engaging in now salt marsh restoration after Sandy, Rhode Island competed for and received in total about, or the council received in total about $7 million to undertake some restoration projects. This one's actually down the Charleston area. What we're proposing to do is dredge material out of the settling basin here, which we have to maintain anyhow. And then put that material back on these marshes here to bring the elevation up. By doing that, we're hoping to preserve a small window of time for these marshes to be able to respond and still be healthy marshes for sea level rise. If it continues, obviously, with some of the rates that we're projecting, we're going to lose them at some point, but we're trying to protect the species that are dependent on these marshes right now. This is another project which we're actually working out a lot of the techniques up in the narrow river. This is a method that's used in the Mid-Atlantic, for instance. This is what our engineer likes to call the spray and pray method. But what they're doing is pumping material here and spraying it out onto the marsh. The problem with that system and the reason we're not using it is, one, you have very little ability to control the depth of that material on the marsh, which is critical to the marsh survival. And two, it has a limitation of about 100 feet. So beyond 100 feet, you're not getting the material into the interior of the marsh, which we obviously want to do. We're working, again, with the University of Rhode Island through the Coastal Resources Center and Sea Grant to undertake pilot projects. And we're working, and North Kingstown is one of the towns that we've been actively working in, trying to do these assessments and start to provide that information to the local town planners. It's a sort of a two-way street because, one, they are a reality check sort of for us to see what information is valuable and what form it's valuable so that we can start to spin this out for other communities. But it also is an ability for the community to see the type of information that we can develop and hopefully become a use to them. As part of that, URI, Coastal Resources Center has developed this municipal decision-making model for adaptation. So what it is, it's sort of a system approach and looking at adaptation on how to go through scope, assess, and then monitor, and then you go right back through the loop again because we're obviously not gonna get all this right the first time. There's other material like the SLAM maps and other material that's being brought in to other efforts that are being undertaken right now to look at climate change and how do we best adapt to that and some of this material is being developed, for instance, for land trust so they can prioritize their acquisition programs. We're working with businesses, particularly waterfront businesses. These guys are gonna be the canaries in the coal mine so we're trying to develop techniques that will, one, help them become more resilient and deal with storms, but also sea level rise at the same time. As you've seen this publication out front, this is a coastal property owner's guide, this is intended to bring it all the way down to the individual level of the person. Unless we can bring it down to that level, anything we do will be useless because they will be weak spots within the system. So we need to work with all our citizens and when it comes to wind from these storms, it's the entire state. Our entire state is impacted by wind and to give you, again, an idea, the damage goes a cube off the wind speed. So if you increase wind speed from a hurricane event, just a little bit, you dramatically increase the damage you're gonna see as a result of that and we have to be aware of that throughout the entire state. As part of that, what we're looking at is a system called Fortified. Fortified is a Code Plus program. It has run through the International Business and Home Safety Institute. This is an institute that's a research facility set up to look at building failures, particularly from storm events and then how do you go back, redesign those and build these so that they withstand these storm events. So as you can see, this is just a system showing a roof covering. As you can see, these joints are covered here. These are not and this is the estimate in terms of the damage that was done by not having that versus having that. That's a small investment. In this particular case, they indicated it was about $500 with material and labor to do this taping, but it reduces your damage profile greatly. These are the types of things we're trying to bring in. We're working with the Rhode Island Builders Association right now to bring this in as part of our program and actually Dave Caldwell, who's the vice president of the Builders Association, is building several fortified homes and going through the rating process right now. And that's something you're gonna hear more of in the future. Green infrastructure is another big push at the federal level where they had green infrastructure in place. Those systems responded much more or they were able to achieve less damage because of those systems than artificial systems. So the idea is to try to go back and build some of the screen infrastructure back into our systems to reduce our damage profiles so that we can start to adapt to these storms that we're seeing. One of the major concerns obviously in most of our cities and towns is we have a lot of historic elements in there and we don't wanna lose the historic components of our community, particular core centers, but and realize. And this is one of the things when we first started this project, we started having discussions with historic preservation people, adaptation did not exist in their vocabulary. They are now starting to talk about it. In fact, there's a national conference here in Newport in 16 that we'll actually be looking at this specific issue as we go forward into that. So as part of this, we're also bringing students in to help us generate new ideas. Students have an incredible amount of creativity and capability to get us to think outside our normal silo or a box. And so we're using these people in real life situations. This is in Newport here, looking at this one's in North Kingstown, looking at these scenarios and how do you make these systems more resilient? Plus it gives them on a learning side, something that no other universities are teaching these kids. They're putting them in contact with real world problems, looking at future situations and giving these kids education that nobody else in the nation's getting. Again, ocean engineering, we're looking at marinas and how do you build a online tool for marinas to assess their resiliency and go forward and design the marinas to become more resilient in the face of seal horizon storms. All this material is gonna get jammed into this document called The Beach Samp, which we're gonna start to right now. And it will focus not only on our permitting process, but also provide some guidance both municipalities and state agencies as well as sort of give a current assessment. This is meant to be, this document here, a living document. Most of our documents are pretty dynamic. They're changing all the time. This one we expect is gonna probably be the most dynamic document because as I said, we're literally learning things new every day about the system. And so the intent is to make this a guidance document so that we can readily update it and then any regulation changes that you would see, and there are samps or a red book. So we've got some work ahead of us. We're starting to go through. This is our work plan that we're completing for 15. These are some of the things that we would like to continue to work on as we go forward here. As you can see, one of the things that we're starting to focus in on very much is this economic side of it. And it's a time for us to go forward and look to adapt. As I said, even if we went to zero emissions today, we're gonna continue to see sea level rise and we need to start to plan for that and deal with it because our planning timeframes for most of our major infrastructure is 20 to 30 years out. So, thank you. After this. Everybody still in shock? Yeah. It's actually taken from some storms that occurred in England several years ago. They had a very bad year with storms. This is flooding that had started to occur within the streets from some of those storm events. As you can see, they had a watertight door there, but.