 Hello, and good afternoon. Welcome to our briefing, Sea Level Rise, Policies to Anticipate Threats and Build Preparedness. I'm Dan Berset, Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Studies Institute. The Environmental and Energy Studies Institute was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental energy and climate change topics to policymakers. More recently, we've also developed a program to provide technical assistance to utilities in rural areas interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. EESI provides informative, objective, nonpartisan coverage of climate change topics and briefings, written materials, and on social media. All of our educational resources, including briefings, recordings, fact sheets, issue briefs, articles, newsletters, and podcasts are always available for free online at www.eesi.org. If you'd like to make sure you always receive our latest resources, take a moment to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Our briefing today about sea level rise is the second in our four-part series, Living with Climate Change, which started with the polar vortex on April 18th. The final two topics covered in the briefing series will be wildfires on June 13th, followed by extreme heat later in June. These four climate impacts are unfortunately not the only ones affecting communities with increased frequency and greater severity. We have a wide range of resources about other climate impacts available online at www.eesi.org with many more to come. If you're familiar with ESI, you know that our approach to policymaker education about climate change is usually focused on solutions. It is not enough to just talk about sea level rise, for example. We also have to consider what we can do about it to improve the resilience of our coastlines, help people in their communities adapt to the changes, and employ emissions reduction strategies at scale to lessen the odds of realizing the worst outcomes of climate change. So along with this series, we are hosting a companion briefing series about opportunities to scale up innovation to drive down emissions. We started with Green Hydrogen on April 27th. Next Wednesday, May 25th, we will pick back up with direct air capture, followed by building out electric vehicle charging infrastructure on June 2nd, and we'll close out the series with offshore wind energy later next month. To learn more and RSVP, visit us online at www.besi.org forward slash briefings, and I encourage everyone to RSVP for the whole series. Even if you have to miss one, by RSVP you will ensure you receive links to the archived webcast presentation materials and written highlights. Coastal resilience in general and sea level rise in particular has been an emphasis of the ESI policymaker education over these last two years. In 2019 and 2020, we organized 16 in-person and online congressional briefings about how communities in coastal regions from Alaska to Florida, from Hawaii to Louisiana, and everywhere in between are working to adapt to climate change and improve their resilience to climate impacts. The entire briefing series is available online. We also compiled a report based on the findings of the briefing series and developed 30 policy recommendations illustrated with case studies with community resilience and adaptation efforts and organized thematically with congressional staff in mind. Many of those recommendations are relevant to our briefing today, and I suspect several will be raised by our panelists as we move through the program. This report, A Resilient Future for Coastal Communities, is also available online at www.esi.org forward slash resilient future. Let me remind everyone that we will have some time for questions later in our program and we'll do our best to incorporate questions from the audience. If you have a question, you can send it to us via email at ASK, at esi.org or even better, follow us on Twitter at ESI online and send it to us that way. We're joined today by a special guest to help us kickstart our program. Representative Kathy Castor serves the 14th district of Florida and Congress. She was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2006. And before that, she served as a Hillsborough County Commissioner and Chair of the Hillsborough County Environmental Protection Commission. A special importance given the topic of our briefing today, Representative Castor chairs the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis and is a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee. In her capacity as chair of the Select Committee, Representative Castor has led the development of a significant hearing record about climate change mitigation and adaptation, compiled and released a comprehensive congressional action plan for a clean energy economy and healthy, resilient and just America and helped guide more than 200 of the climate solutions in the report into law and passed more than half of the total 750 recommendations. So it's my privilege to welcome Representative Kathy Castor to our briefing today. Hello, I'm Congresswoman Kathy Castor. I represent the Tampa Bay area in the US Congress and I chaired the House Select Committee on the climate crisis. Thank you for this important discussion on the threat of sea level rise and how we can address the risks and costs of the climate crisis. Sea level rise is already disrupting coastal communities, including my own on Florida's West Coast. Tampa Bay is expecting sea level rise by about a foot or more over the next few decades and that's creating new and looming challenges, especially because people want to live on the water and governments have to respond to impacted infrastructure and that is costly. Plus, there is great pressure to rebuild after disaster strikes. That's why it's crucial that we address the issues you'll be hearing about today. How do we advance flood resilience and prepare communities for these impacts? How do we maximize solutions to prevent the loss of life and property? How do we ensure this progress benefits environmental justice communities? The good news is we know how to address some of these questions. Back in 2020, my committee, the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis released a congressional climate crisis action plan with hundreds of recommendations to expand clean energy and boost resilience. We included recommendations like a national climate adaptation program. We included measures to address and accelerate disaster recovery and for expanding the use of actionable climate science so that we understand the risks. We also recommended updates to codes and standards that are so vital to protecting our communities in way of life back home and all of these solutions would help Americans prepare for the risks ahead and to confront the growing costs. We've already made progress on some of them thanks to President Biden. We made transformational investments through the bipartisan infrastructure law that are now reaching states and communities, including the 3.5 billion for flood mitigation assistance grants, historic investment in the building resilient infrastructure and communities grant program and 500 million for the New Storm Act Revolving Loan Program and over 17 billion to support the work of the Army Corps of Engineers. We know we must do more and we'll keep working on solutions because there is no other choice. So thank you for today's discussion and keep up the fight for clean energy and a more resilient America. Thank you, Representative Kaster for joining us today and sharing your remarks and that Revolving Loan Fund sounds really good to me. We have particularly a very good fact sheet about Revolving Loan Funds for Nature-based Solutions and Coastal Resilience, which is one of my favorites that we've done lately. So great topic and thanks for bringing that up. We'll now turn to our first of four panelists. And so let me introduce Susan Rufo. Susan is Senior Advisor for Ocean and Climate at the UN Foundation and Co-Facilitator of the Coastal Flood Resilience Project, a coalition of organizations working to prepare for rising sea levels in the United States. She formerly served as Associate Director for Climate Preparedness and Resilience to Council and Environmental Quality under President Obama. She spent her career between government and civil society as a Foreign Service Officer at the Department of State, as well as in senior positions with the Ocean Conservatory with Ocean Conservancy, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Nature Conservancy. Susan, welcome to the briefing today. I'm looking forward to your presentation. Great, thank you so much, Dan. Thank you to EESI for holding this really important discussion and for including me on the panel. I think sea level rise is one of the most challenging issues we face as a planet, as a nation, as communities. And so it's really great to be having this discussion with so many amazing experts in this field. And if you go to the next slide, I just wanna step back for just a second and talk about what is sea level rise? Because I think a lot of us have in our heads what we think it is or we have pictures, but it sometimes is a lot more complicated than we think on the surface. At a fundamental level, sea level rise is basically a result of global warming and climate change. Two fundamental causes. Glaciers are melting and so the added water is basically coming into the world's oceans and rising sea levels. In addition, warming temperatures throughout the globe essentially cause that water to expand and again, sea levels to rise. But it's a little more complicated than that in that it also combines with things like increased storms and lands and sightings and rainfall and a whole bunch of other things to affect the communities sitting on our coast. So sea level rise doesn't look the same in every place. And we can't really exactly predict what it will look like in any given place. It also has a time component. So we often talk about sea level rise as being something that will happen so much by 2050 or so much by 2100, which often gives people the impression that that's something that's happening in the future. And we can think about that later and there's sort of an end state that we need to deal with. But really it's happening continuously and it's happening now. So what we're already seeing are impacts of sea level rise like increased storm surges, like sunny day flooding that doesn't even happen with storms or inundation of seawater into water systems that we don't necessarily think about when we think about sea level rise but we also have to deal with when we think about this issue. And I think the other important thing is that sea levels are going to continue to rise no matter what we do on climate change mitigation. So it's incredibly important that we work on reducing emissions, that we mitigate climate change, but there's also going to be sort of an inertia that happens with our seas that will continue the sea levels rising. So we can't just shut this off. We are going to have to deal with it and it's going to be around for decades. And so the sooner we really start to think about how we work on it the better because it is translating into more vulnerability and more risk for our communities, for our people, for our economies and for everything in between. So next slide please. Now what does that mean in the US specifically? Well, we know that the sea level has been rising and we have data that shows that we also know that it's going to continue to rise and our science is getting better and better at predicting what that will look like. And in the US, we are very fortunate to have an amazing group of federal agencies that have come together to really think about what do these projections look like over time? And just earlier this year, we had the latest report on sea level rise in the United States put out by NOAA, NASA, EPA, the US Geological Survey, Department of Defense, FEMA and the US Army Corps of Engineers as well as several academic institutions. And their combined knowledge, their combined expertise has basically come up with this prediction or set of projections for what sea level rise will look like in the US. And this is still very technical maybe, but so what does that really translate into? What it really translates into essentially is that we are expecting on average 10 to 12 inches of sea level rise in the US by 2050 and most likely greater than two feet by 2100. And that's a lot of water coming into our cities and our coasts. And it'll be more in some places as Representative Castor said in Florida, we expect maybe even more than that whereas in Seattle where I live, maybe we'll get a little less. Next slide please. And so what does that really mean? I mean, what it means is that the sea levels are rising faster than we've seen and the next 30 years, we'll see as much sea level rises as we've seen in the last century. And that's going to translate into obviously increased coastal flooding, even the absence of rain or storms or anything else that we might historically think of as causing flooding for us. Next slide please. So most people picture this when they think of sea level rise. They think of inundation. They think of really dramatic water sort of coming in and flooding communities. And this is clearly happening. This is already happening in the US. These are real pictures but it's not just something that we think about at this extreme or that we should think about at this extreme. It's really a lot more than this and it's happening a lot sooner than the 2050 or 2100 endpoints that we often use as our projections. Next slide please. And so in practical terms, probably the most, one of the biggest impacts that we're gonna be seeing is actually what's called sometimes sunny day flooding or nuisance flooding or high tide flooding, which means essentially that without storms, without wind, without rains, we still will get flooding and we still do get flooding in coastal towns just because of high tides because the average sea level rise is already getting closer to where our businesses and homes and infrastructure is sitting. And we have also federal agencies have been doing really great work on this as well. So NOAA has a report every year that talks about basically the predictions for nuisance flooding or high tide flooding. And essentially, if you look at their data years ago, powerful storms are really what caused this flooding. Now it happens regular high tides or seasonal high tides or even wind events sometimes. And on average, there are about twice as frequent as these floods used to be in 2000 and we're expecting to increase in frequency as sea levels rise again. So in real terms, for a place like Miami or Charleston, we're talking about instead of one to zero to two days of this type of flooding per year, we'll see five to 10. Next slide, please. And just a very local example, Kristen Jacobs, who is a former mayor and representative from Broward County, Florida used to talk about how on sunny days and high tides, their parking lot for their police department would actually flood and it would flood so much that essentially the saltwater would reach the bottom of the police cars, which would eventually rust out because of course the saltwater corrodes the metal and they'd have to replace those cars. There was no insurance that would cover it. There were no warranties that would cover it. And it ended up being an enormous expense for their police department that they hadn't necessarily budgeted for and really had no recourse for how to deal with. Other things that we don't usually think about for sea level rise are things like navigation. Are there bridges that may actually become a little too low at high tide for certain ships depending on how much the sea levels rise? Are there places that we might actually get more ships in because channels are getting deeper? Are there waste sites, for example, that may actually get inundated as waters start to infiltrate? A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that there are more 800 hazardous superfund sites on the Atlantic and Gulf Coast alone that are at risk of inundation from sea level rise. So some of these things are not necessarily obvious, but obviously really important for us to think about. Next slide please. So I think that obviously brings us to the first question of well, what do we do? Well, the first we have to cut emissions. Even though sea level rise will continue after we cut emissions, what we do with our emissions now will dictate how much sea level rise we'll see in the future. And that's part of the reason why these projections are so wide. So cutting emissions is absolutely key to making this manageable, hopefully. Next. Second, we have to understand the problem and then provide the resources that are needed to help us explain it and to act on it. So it's about good science, but also as Representative Kaster said, it's about usable and actionable science. Next point. We have to engage stakeholders. Our coasts are very different. Our communities are very different. The impacts will be very different. And what people want out of this will be very different. And so we have to make sure that people in communities and on coasts are part of the solution. And next point. And we have to make sure that we are incorporating all of this knowledge, all of this engagement, all of this information into all of our future plans and policies and development. Otherwise, if we set this off in a silo, it's not really gonna make much of a difference. Next slide, please. So what does this mean in terms of a policy context? I think there's a couple of key pieces. One, this is not an environmental problem. We often think of climate change as something that environmentalists and environmental agencies deal with, but this affects every aspect of society. It's a health problem. It's an economic problem. It's an environmental problem for sure, but it's also an infrastructure problem, a security problem, a justice problem and everything else. And we need to think about it that way. And the second thing is every level of government has to be part of the solution because we're talking about a global phenomenon that national policies affect, but also where solutions are incredibly local down to sometimes zoning restrictions. So everyone has to be part of the solution. And within that context, because I think a lot of the folks that are participating today are at the federal level, I think the federal government has some very key roles. One is the federal government has a lot of responsibilities just to get its own house in order. And that means everything from facilities and lands that the federal government manages to the services that the federal government provides to people. So how do we make sure that all of that can continue that we're mitigating the risks to those federal investments and services? The second is making sure that other levels of government are able to move forward and build resilience sort of within their areas of responsibility. And that can be regulatory, that can be incentives, that can be funding, that can be science, which is the last point really, which is how do you then provide this information and science like the sea level rise scenarios report that came out earlier this year that then form a basis for action at all levels. Next slide, please. So there are many organizations that are working on this that are thinking about this that have a lot of expertise through the Coastal Flood Resilience Project that Dan mentioned earlier. My co-facilitator, Jeff Peterson has brought together a lot of these groups and a lot of the reports and other work that they've done on this topic to really analyze it for some common themes, common recommendations and sort of areas where we think we can move this forward. And what he has essentially synthesized is this national policy agenda for rising seas that takes a lot of this expertise and puts it together for policymakers. And this is just the very high level version of it. I encourage you to go to the website, go to the original reports and look at the details. But this is a good starting point for the types of things that we really need to think about doing. And it's everything from building information and capacity building to better preparing for disasters and storms now and in the short term, thinking about long-term inundation and what that state looks like and how we deal with that, whether that's within our sort of long-lived infrastructure like transportation or energy or water systems or, and also thinking about how we may need to relocate and migrate either our built infrastructure, our built systems or some of the natural and coastal ecosystems that we all rely on for various things. And then really thinking about how do we integrate social justice into this? Because so many of the communities that are most impacted will be most impacted, most impacted by other events will be most impacted by sea level rise and yet have the least capacity to adapt. Next slide, please. So obviously there's work from with the executive branch and the legislative branch on this agenda. And there's things that sort of agencies across the board as well as Congress can be doing and can be thinking about and are already doing in fact, but can be really amplified and coordinated. On the executive side, which is the side where I have experienced, there is this fundamental piece of just how do agencies think about their own roles in all of this. And so agencies have been asked to do adaptation plans that basically looked at their own facilities, their own workforces, but also their missions and how do they adapt to the impacts of climate change generally, including sea level rise in all of this. And I think that's a really important look that those agencies have to take. There's also, as I said, this role for the federal agencies in providing good science, actionable science, accessible science that can be used, not only by federal scientists, but by a mayor in a small town in Georgia so that he or she really understands the risks to their community and what they can do about it. And then there's really thinking about how do we level the playing field so that communities have access to all of this work, that we really build resilience into all of the plans that we're making. And also specifically, how do we think about nature in that equation? Because there are natural solutions that can help us be more resilient if we use them correctly. And I know we'll hear more about that later. Next slide, please. And then of course, on the congressional side, there's certainly a lot of support that can be provided. One is obviously funding, critical role for Congress. So funding, not only the federal science and support, but also funding for planning, for community action, for state action, for plans and for implementation, including everything from built infrastructure to natural infrastructure. And really, how do we highlight some of that? And then ensuring that existing programs within the federal government are incorporating C-level rise. So that again, this isn't just siloed out somewhere where we deal with C-level rise and then we deal with all the other things we have to deal with. It's part of the National Flood Insurance Program. It's part of our water resources management. It's part of everything that we do. And I think Congress has a real role to play and there are examples of legislation now that are starting to incorporate that. And then finally, I think there's a really important role for Congress to really help to coordinate and champion this action, not only across the federal government, but also across all of these different communities and coastal areas in our nation that are working on this. And how do we really think about how we promote resilience across that? And just a couple of examples on that front, we've seen the Ocean-Based Climate Solutions Act, which provides for conservation and restoration of natural areas that really help build resilience. How do we ensure that we are thinking about that in the right way so that those natural areas can provide those services? And what do we need to do to ensure that they can do that long into the future? The Water Resources Development Act, how do we ensure that we're requiring studies that actually are looking at C-level rise in storm surges so that we are taking into account these short-term impacts, but also these long-term impacts and the state of inundation that we'll be seeing in decades to come so that the infrastructure and the programs that we're putting in place are still meaningful? Next slide. And so with that, I will turn it over because we've got some amazing experts that are coming up next on the panel, but I will offer these resources for anyone who wants more details after listening to this panel. Thank you very much to my co-facilitator, Jeff Peterson, who's done a lot of the hard and analytic work and all of the groups that are part of the Coastal Flood Resilience Project, Unit of Concerned Scientists, the Anthropocene Institute, Sir Frider Foundation, Meridian Institution and a whole bunch of others that I don't have time to answer. Thank you again to ESI for this conversation for everyone who's joined. Thank you, Susan, for that great presentation and your last slide is a great reminder to me to remind our audience that our presentation materials or speaker presentation materials will be made available online at www.esi.org, along with the webcast and eventually written highlight notes. So if you want to go back and revisit any of Susan's slides, especially that last one that had the all those great links and resources, it's esi.org is the place to do it. Our second panelist today is Robin Craig. Robin is the Robert C. Packard trustee chair in law at the University of Southern California of Gould School of Law, where she teaches a variety of environmental and natural resources law courses, including ocean and coastal law. Among other subjects her writing focuses on adapting to climate change impacts on and the acidification of the ocean. Her books on climate change adaptation include re-envisioning the Anthropocene ocean, the end of sustainability, resilience and the future of environmental governance and the Anthropocene and comparative ocean governance placed based projections in an era of climate change. And I've seen Robin's slides. Wait till you get a load of them. Robin, it's so nice to see you today and I'll turn it over to you for your presentation. All right, thank you. All right, so I'm gonna be speaking on the legal aspects of sea level rise. It's nice of everyone to be here. And I have a couple of main points. I'm gonna be running through a lot of legal issues, but that is the main point. There are a lot of legal issues that sea level rise creates. They are legal issues that arise at all levels of government, federal, state and local. And they have to coordinate and work together as Susan emphasized, to have a sea level rise adaptation strategy that makes sense across the board. So I'm gonna emphasize six categories of legal issues. There are others, but these are some of the main ones. First, properties. Can you build a seawall? For example, what happens when you have to retreat? Second, constitutional takings, which is probably what most people are most aware of. What happens or the litigation that gets going when you can't build a seawall or are ordered to retreat? Insurance is another big issue. Private insurance companies, as a result of climate change are departing the coast. They're also leaving California because of wildfires. And coastal storms have bankrupted both federal and state insurance initiatives. So that is an issue we have to think about. Fourth, water supplies. There are many places that will be in trouble because of their drinking water supplies becoming contaminated with seawater long before they're actually inundated to the extent that they have to move. So paying attention to what's going on with water supply, also important. At the very local level, building codes, how do you actually design buildings and put in, I will add land use plans that can cope with incoming saltwater and worsening storms. And then finally, an area I think is neglected is public health. Legally, public health is a great handle for getting to some of the issues that plague sea level rise. But we were gonna have toxic hotspots, new diseases. And this is particularly important for environmental justice because it's the overburdened communities already who tend to be harmed most by what sea level rise does to these troubled spots. So to start with, property is probably one of the first things you think about when you think about sea level rise. A lot of this is state law, but I will mention at the federal law level, there are a lot of federal installations along the coast, such as Navy bases, that when they're thinking about how they use their properties, they can really either help or hinder the surrounding community in becoming more resilient to climate change and sea level rise. So that's something for the federal government to think about. For example, if a Navy base needs an elevated road for access, that elevated road has the potential to help the surrounding community as well. And so those are the kinds of synergies we need to be thinking about. But at the state level is where a lot of this litigation is arising right now. And so a case from just up the coast for me, Laguna Beach, a house involving a temporary sea wall, the deal was that the property owners could have this sea wall as long as they didn't renovate the house. Well, you can see they did massively renovate the house and put in what many people refer to as the Jurassic Park Sea Wall to go with it. The California Coastal Commission, which is generally not in favor of sea walls, ordered it to be torn down and imposed a million dollar penalty. That was upheld through the California court system, including in March, 2021 by the California Supreme Court when it refused to review the case. Now, different states think differently about these coastal infrastructure projects on private property, but we're gonna see more and more of this litigation as property owner, coastal property owners want to put in infrastructure that could eventually be damaging to everyone. To go with that constitutional takings when private property owners can't do what they want, they tend to sue for a constitutional taking. The important part there is they usually lose. It's expensive litigation for the states and counties and the federal government, but property owners usually lose. And along with that, coastal judges are becoming more savvy about sea level rise issues and the other impacts that go with it. So a very important case and how it thought about takings litigation in the coastal zone was Bureau of Harvey Seeders versus Karen, which came out of the New Jersey Supreme Court in 2013. And what this case involves is actually an eminent domain case, not takings, but the logic it carries over. New Jersey did be tree nourishment, put in some major sand dunes that blocked the Karen's view of the beach. Karen's demanded compensation for that loss of a view. At a lower court were awarded compensation. And in one of the most exquisitely timed events in the history of takings litigation, during the appeals, Superstorm Sandy hit the coast. And as you can see, the Karen's house was left standing because of those beach dunes. They got a protection value. So what the New Jersey Supreme Court said was, hey, yes, maybe you lost your right to a view, but when we're calculating compensation, we're also going to take into account the benefits you received from that beach tree nourishment and the replacement of those sand dunes as has become obvious in the wake of Superstorm Sandy and the Karen's compensation ended up being about a dollar. So judges are getting more creative about thinking about what needs to be done in the coastal zone. And that is a very hopeful sign for resilience. All right, insurance issues, and this does directly affect the federal government. Ensuring an increasingly inundated and storm-ridden coast makes no fiscal sense. Flooding has always been a difficult proposition in terms of being financially sound for insurance companies, and coastal flooding is even worse. So a lot of the risks to homes from sea level rise and the storms that go with it are increasing. What we see is that most repetitive loss properties now are along the coast. There are some along major rivers, but mostly they are along the coast. And that fact is bankrupting the National Flood Insurance Program. So this is a national program. It underwrites a lot of flooding along the coastal zone. You can see 2005, that massive hurricane season that had Katrina, Rita, William and Dennis. You can see later in 2012, another massive hurricane season. If I extended this out, you would see a couple more hurricane seasons that just are putting the costs of that program into the billions of dollars. So one way to think about coastal resilience is when we have these repetitive loss properties, maybe it's time to think about turning pure insurance programs that allow you to rebuild into some sort of government buyout program where we're actually helping people move off a dangerous coast with the money to relocate. Again, this goes to equity issues. It's oftentimes lower income communities and communities of color that will be holding the most risky properties and any financial assistance they can receive to get to safe for the ground will eventually be very important. All right, water supply, probably not the thing most people think about first, but I also do water loss. So I do. A good example of the risk to drinking water comes from Florida, where a lot of the drinking water comes from coastal aquifers. And those aquifers are at increasing risk of saltwater intrusion. Made worse, by the way, in some localities by extensive groundwater pumping. And that groundwater pumping can pull saltwater in. This is a national problem. This was a study in 2020 out of nature communication, showing saltwater intrusion as a drinking water problem around the United States on every coast. And so it needs to be thought about. But there are infrastructure solutions. So this is Orange County in California. Orange County made the decision quite a while ago to start recycling its treated, well, basically it's sewage treatment water. After it treats that to very clean water, it injects it into its local groundwater to store the water for future groundwater use. But on one end of that, Orange County is at risk of saltwater intrusion from the ocean. And so it has an injection well very close to the ocean to put a continuing stream of new fresh water in there to protect the rest of the aquifers from saltwater intrusion. So these are possible solutions for resilience that may need to be considered in other places as well. All right, building codes at the very local level, good building codes can prevent a lot of damage and loss of life, but local communities could use some guidance, say from the federal government on best practices and examples to put in place. For example, if you're thinking about hurricane resistant homes, you want more curves than corners and you want different kinds of reinforcement that are found in normal homes. Engineers are getting very good at building these things but helping put some legal impetus in place to encourage people to build them would be a good thing. I'll just throw in for fun that engineers are getting very creative about how to design homes on land to be resilient to sea level rise and the increasing storm surge that comes with them. And even thinking about designing floating buildings offshore that can just rise and fall with the sea levels and be resilient that way. All right, my last topic, public health. Again, I think this is the most neglected of the sea level rise resilience strategies, but it really is low hanging fruit that again has some real environmental justice components to it. So just as an example, what did hurricane Harvey encounter when it made landfall? A lot of waste treatment facilities that were not prepared to deal with that amount of rainfall, some toxic release inventory sites, petroleum refineries and natural gas processing. So this is what a hurricane does to an oil refinery. This is not good for water quality. It is not good for land contamination and it's also not good for air pollution. So these kinds of flooding together with the Arkema fire made air quality in Houston toxic basically, very unbearable. And that's because these facilities had not been designed for the increasing rates of flooding that we're gonna see with hurricanes and increasing tides. Also sewage treatment facilities are not designed for that kind of flooding, particularly if they are designed so that all stormwater goes through them, which is a bad idea for many reasons. But when Hurricane Michael made landfall in Florida, it did overwhelm the sewage treatment plants and we had all sorts of pathogens released into the water. Hurricane Katrina did the same thing, Superstorm Sandy did the same thing. All three storms very narrowly avoided having large scale public health disasters because of the pathogens that were widely released into the environment. Sea level rise also increases mosquito habitat. Malaria is endemic to the United States and we have already seen native cases of dengue fever in Florida. So this extended mosquito habitat is also a public health consideration. Mosquito control has often been federally motivated with some state help. This is something to be thinking about. So some other legal strategies, we already have laws in place like CERCLA or Superfund and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act that exist to clean up toxic sites. We could prioritize the coast a little more heavily than we do. That's a good idea for a lot of reasons including environmental justice but it was certainly helped with resilience to sea level rise as well. And then finally, legal strategy number two, land use planning. Land use planning is often a state function but in the coastal zone, we have the Coastal Zone Management Act which all coastal states except Alaska participate in. There are ways to make that act a little more responsive. I'll have a little more federal oversight of what goes where in the coastal zone and how it gets built. So can we design sewage treatment facilities in the coastal zone so that they close up during flooding so that the pathogens are not released. All right, that was a lot in a hurry and I thank you for your attention but there are a lot of legal ways we could increase resilience and environmental justice at the same time. Thank you. Thank you, Robin and I'm hopeful that we'll come back to a lot of the issues you raised during our question and answer period after our fourth panelist and as a reminder if folks in our audience have questions you would like to ask with a couple of different ways to do that. One is you can send us an email ask at esi.org that's ask.org I also follow us on Twitter at ESI online. Our next panelist is Lydia Olander. Lydia directs the ecosystem services program at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University. She's also an adjunct professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke. She leads the National Ecosystem Services Partnership which supports efforts to integrate ecosystem services into decision making. Lydia studies environmental markets and mitigation, climate mitigation and resilience for natural and working lands and sustainable infrastructure. She also serves on the US Army Corp of Engineers Environmental Advisory Board and the Secretariat of the Bridge Collaborative and is published in a wide range of professional journals. Lydia, welcome to the briefing today. I'm looking forward to your slides. Thank you and thank you so much for hosting this briefing. It's great to be a part of it. So today I'm gonna talk about how natural habitats coastal habitats provide coastal resilience and their role. I'd like to acknowledge my co-authors on this work, Katie Warnell and Carolyn Curran. And wanna point out that I have a number of resources that I've shared with EESI that will be posted on their website. So if I talk about something you're interested in finding out more about, please check out those resources. Next slide, please. So the reason I think it's important to think about the natural coastal habitats is that they play a significant role in resilience in these coastal communities as well as providing a number of other benefits. So when people talk about nature-based solutions, some of those are existing habitats and the benefits that they provide. So these coastal marshes, they are significant for recreation and tourism more than a third of US adults participate in wetland-based recreational activities like hunting, fishing, bird watching and photography. These coastal habitats also support recreational fishing which in 2018 supported about almost a half a million jobs and generated around 72 billion in sales impact in the US. They're also important for commercial fishing. These coastal wetlands support more than half of the US commercial fishing industry through their nurseries and the development of the fisheries that they use. Coastal habitats also are really important for coastal protection. So they help protect homes, businesses and infrastructure from erosion and storms. During hurricane, sandy coastal wetlands reduced flood damages on the East coast by $625 million. They also store and lock away significant amounts of carbon and store it for hundreds of years. This is often called blue carbon and it's estimated that the continental US coastal marshes contain around 2 billion metric tons of carbon. So what's gonna happen to these habitats under sea level rise? So coastal marshes, there are three things that can happen. One is that they accumulate sediments over time and grow in place and will increase their height vertically and be able to be maintained as sea level rise happens as long as sea level rise doesn't surpass them. If sea level rise is faster than they can grow, then they drown and they go away or they migrate upland and inland. So those are the three things that can happen to salt marshes. So we wanted to see what was gonna happen to these habitats in the Eastern seaboard. So we looked from New York down to North Carolina and studied how sea level rise was going to affect these habitats. And these maps show you the zone that we studied from New York down to North Carolina. And the map on the right shows you a zoom in for North Carolina where the blue habitats are current coastal marshes and the pink areas are where coastal marshes are likely to migrate inland. So there's a significant area where this migration is likely to happen and this transition zone includes right now communities and agricultural lands as well as natural habitats. Next slide. So here we're looking at the original coastal marshes in purple and the vast majority of those are going to be lost, they'll be drowned over time in this region. This is a scenario that's kind of a moderate level of sea level rise. So over a hundred years, they'll be up to four feet of sea level rise in some of these areas. And so most of that salt marsh gets lost in this area a little bit persists. When we go inland to look at some of those transition zones that now have forests and shrublands and freshwater wetlands, about half of that turns into marsh but then gets lost and drowned and then the rest either remains as new marsh or in their original habitats. So significant transitions to these habitats over about a hundred year period are currently expected. So what does this mean for communities? Next slide. We're likely to see a lot of these community impacts that we've talked about already but we're gonna reduce some of the coastal protection in areas where these habitats disappear. We're going to have saltwater intrusion and loss of productive lands as salt marsh and saltwater moves inland. We'll have less pleasant views as salt marsh is degraded and as these forests get transitioned and we have ghost forests in the region that are already happening at fairly large scale. We're also going to lose our stored carbon and lose some of the habitats and species that are important for fish nurseries and birding and hunting and other things that are important along the coastline. Next slide. So there are a number of different strategies to enhance resilience in the coastal region to these natural habitats and to the other transition habitats. So to maintain existing coastal marshes their activities like thin layer placement which is taking dredge materials from navigation channels and such and putting that material on a marsh that's degrading and helping it increase in elevation and sustain over time. There's also living shorelines and these are things like building oyster marsh or putting in some kind of rocky barrier along with natural habitat like marsh and helping that reduce erosion and maintain those habitats and provide protection inland. And some of these living shorelines we're seeing those mile long living shorelines put up in a number of places in the region and they've been shown to have a significant effect in improving coastal protection. To slow inland saltwater movement and marsh migration there are berms being put up in a number of places as well as ditch control. So a lot of these areas have been ditched to drain them for agriculture and other purposes and there can be water control structures put in place to keep freshwater on the land and keep saltwater off which will reduce the migration of marsh in those areas. Another thing people are talking about is wanting salt marsh migration in some ways to maintain a lot of the benefits it provides and you could potentially try to direct that marsh migration to where we want it. So make sure we're removing barriers like roads and other infrastructure that's in the way of the migration of those habitats and protecting those corridors for where we want those habitats to persist in the future. And finally there are things we can do where this transition happens. We can cut timber before it turns into a ghost forest to get the value of that timber and reduce the carbon that's coming off those lands. We could also think about new revenue streams as we transition maybe from agriculture to coastal marsh in some of these areas. There are significant revenue streams from hunting and fishing in these areas. Next slide. There are lots of federal programs that could play a role in helping this happen. So one thing that's important for the thin layer placement and living shoreline type activities are permitting. There was in 2017 the Army Corps did a nationwide general permit for living shorelines which has really accelerated their use in the region and some states have followed suit which is helping. That's not yet happened for the thin layer sediment placement. As we learn more about that, it seems like it might be time to start thinking about that for those kinds of activities. So we can really scale them up and accelerate their use. There's also needs to be additional funding for these kinds of activities. Right now the National Fish and Wildlife that foundation has some programs. DoD is doing some funding through the REPI program and other programs. But we need to scale up resources for those kinds of activities. Another area that's useful would be on the agricultural side and USDA programs. We need to make sure that the agricultural easement programs are available for things like saltwater intrusion. There are a number of different programs that USDA has to deal with issues around flooding, watershed protection and flood prevention program which allows easements. There's also the emergency watershed protection and floodplain easement program. There's the wetland reserve program. A lot of these could potentially be used in this way. So far I haven't seen any examples of that but there may be some I don't know about. So trying to figure out how these USDA programs can help coastal farmers and deal with those transitions would be important. Another thing is these federal buyouts. So when we're doing these buyouts we can think not only about helping to move people away from these areas at high risk and vulnerability but think about how we can do that in a way where we create new natural habitats where those infrastructure used to be. And those could be pathways for marsh migration and future habitats that could help protect future communities and provide those benefits that these habitats provide. Next slide. So I just wanted to point out that there are lots of different agencies that are engaged in nature-based solutions for coastal habitats in various different ways. And there was a resource that was put out by the federal government around Earth Day. And this is a compendium of federal nature-based resources for coastal communities, states, tribes and territories which lists out a lot of the existing resources, tools and funding programs which is a nice starting point for kind of understanding where the different federal agencies are engaged and what they're doing. Next slide. And finally, I wanted to note along with this compendium on Earth Day there was this executive order that came out on enlisting nature, sorry, and strengthening America's forests. And in section four was about enlisting nature in the fight against climate change. And there were a number of things happening that are worth noting. One is there's a report on nature-based solutions that's going to be put forward in terms of how the federal government across all the agencies can address some of the barriers and move forward solutions. And then there's guidance on valuing nature. So one of the issues that's really important is how do we value the multiple benefits that nature provides to help move nature-based solutions forward in federal and local decisions. Thank you. Thank you, Lydia. And I know you said this at the start of your presentation but I'll reiterate it, the resources you provided and referenced along the way are available at www.esi.org. So thank you very much for that. Before I introduce our fourth panelist, one last reminder that if you have questions, if you're in the audience and you have a question, you can send us an email at ask at esi.org, that's ASK at esi.org or follow us on Twitter at ESI online. Our fourth panelist today is A.R. Siders. She's an assistant professor at the University of Delaware in the Disaster Research Center, at the Biden School of Public Policy Administration in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences in the College of Earth, Ocean and the Environment. Her research focuses on climate change adaptation, decision-making and evaluation, how and why communities decide when, where and how to adapt to the effects of climate change and how these decisions and decision-making processes affect risk reduction and equity outcomes. And Siders' current research projects focus on adaptive capacity, managed retreat and adaptation equity. Welcome to the briefing today. I'll turn it over to you. Thanks, thanks. Thank you for that introduction and thanks for having me here today and for this discussion. So my title slide is the summary of the presentation. So if you take one thing away from today, take away the summary presentation slide. I'm going to talk primarily about managed retreat. So about the buyout programs that Lydia just mentioned and about how we can help communities and households relocate away from risk prone areas. I'm going to give a brief introduction to the ideas and then have 13 sort of recommendations throughout that where we can have federal reform from either action from Congress or agency reform that would help these programs progress. The thing I'd like to start with though is I'd like to just suggest that the things we're all discussing today are not really alternatives. Like we're gonna present different views on how to approach these problems but the answer for having a resilient United States and a resilient coast is gonna be that we have to do all of the above. So I just hope anyone watching keeps that in mind that like when providing this litany of actions that need to be taken, it isn't just a, these aren't alternative paths. These are things that all need to be pursued and in some cases need to be pursued simultaneously. So with that sort of a quick overview when we think mostly about coasts and ways that we can adapt to coasts, we have four main categories of ways we can adapt to coast. We can resist, we can try to hold the ocean back like literally just try to hold the water back. And we can do that with seawalls, we can do that with beach nourishment in dunes, we can do that with living shorelines, all different kinds of options here. But this is resistance, this is trying to hold the ocean in place. Then we can accommodate, we can let the water come and go and we hope that the water does less damage. So the classic example here is to elevate homes, to put them up so that the water comes and it goes under the homes. And yes, it causes some damage, it's still going to say take away the car or rust out the car or cause damage to crops and to the garden but maybe not to the residents who are now safer up high. Then of course we can retreat. So this is the main thing I'm gonna talk about today, retreat we can relocate infrastructure and homes that are located near the coasts to safer, drier lands. And then of course we could avoid, we could not build there in the first place. And I'm gonna talk primarily about these last two and I'll talk about them a little bit in conjunction because it would make the retreat problem a lot easier if we started avoiding putting more homes in risk prone areas to start with. Think about managed retreat. You will also hear a major treat called planned retreat or strategic retreat or relocation or resettlement. There's a lot of different terminology going around right now and a lot of debates about the best terminology to use when talking to communities. But essentially what it means is the purposeful planned and very often government supported movement of people or assets away from very highly hazardous areas. This is distinct from people who are displaced due to a disaster or from people who decide to move on their own. People who no longer want to deal with the effects of floods and so they move without government intervention that is not managed retreat. So reasons we need to have managed retreat, we need to think about managed retreat are one that it reduces disaster costs. It's one of the most effective ways to reduce costs permanently because you literally just take the home and move it away. There's no need to go back and re-nourish and rebuild those dunes. There's no need to go back and elevate that house higher farther up or to elevate the roads because simply their things aren't there. And so we're not experiencing those costs. This is a big deal because as Robin already pointed out the number of disasters is on the rise and the expense of those disasters is on the rise. We have more than 50 disaster declarations in a given year on average. The number of billion dollar disasters is on the rise. Pew Foundation calculates that there's about a 23% increase in the cost of these disasters over the last decade. We're also having lots of building and rebuilding in the flood plain. We have so many new homes that are going into flood prone areas. We have about eight states that are calculated to be building faster inside the flood plain than they are outside of it. The government has paid to rebuild homes 10, 20, 30 times inside those flood plains, sometimes at 10 times the cost of what it would cost to acquire the home. So relocation can be a real cost saving measure to try to bring down those expenses over the long term. It's also important to protect families to give them options, right? People who no longer want to live in an area where they are being flooded over and over again who want to get out to no longer want the mental or financial stress of living in that flood prone area. And then of course, as we've been talking about nature based strategies, relocation and retreat can help create space for those healthy coasts for wetland restoration and the nature based strategies that we have been talking about. One of the things I want to note here is that this is a big challenge because the problem is getting so much worse. So this is a government accountability office report that came out in 2020 and it looked at repetitive flood loss properties. So those properties that are being flooded multiple times and experiencing damage. And it found that great FEMA had helped out about 45,000, 50,000 homes over the 2009 to 2020 or 2019, sorry, but at the same time, we had 64,000 new properties become repetitive flood loss properties. So we've actually increased the number of repetitive flood loss properties over the same time period. Like we're not doing enough to help these repetitive flood loss property homeowners to be solving the problem, right? The scale is outpacing our effort at fixing it. And so one of the biggest things we need to do is we need to stop that number of repetitive flood loss properties from growing. And that can be done by buying them out, which is the main way that these 45,000 homes have had their flood risk reduced. And it can also be by trying to stop new development going into those flood prone areas. We have 9,000 new homes in New Jersey, Florida and North Carolina alone that have been built in the last 10 years in the 10 year floodplain. Now a 10 year floodplain has a 96% chance of flooding over the course of a 30 year mortgage. So these are 9,000 more homeowners that we know are almost guaranteed to experience some sort of flood in their neighborhood, if not in their home, before they finish paying for that. At immediate home value in those states, that's roughly $2 billion more at risk property that could be flooded. So that's kind of the scale of the problem that we need to stop having that happen. Local land use in these buildings is really a federal issue, but, or sorry, it's a local and state issue, not a federal issue, but the federal government can do a lot to try to incentivize state and local governments to take action. And so that's really where we need to see action there. I mentioned that this is also really important for homeowners. And I keep coming back to these stories about Houston in the aftermath of the several hurricanes they've been facing and looking at these families who are living in these flood prone homes and who want out but don't have an option. And this one particularly I think sticks with me because in this household, these children had PTSD. They were crying every time it flooded because they were so scared. They'd lived through the last hurricane and they knew what it did. It destroyed their home and they didn't want to live through it again. And the parents want to relocate. They wanted to take their children somewhere safer where they wouldn't have to re-experience that trauma, but they can't afford to because they're not being offered a buyout. They're not being offered to have help with their treat. So their options are to sell their home at a loss or to stay and face the fact that they'll probably be flooded again and they'll probably have more challenges in the future. And so wouldn't it be great if we had better managed treat policies that could give families like this an option to get out when they no longer want to experience this? I think you'll often hear people say in the news or you'll hear stories by people like, I'm never going to leave. And there's this assumption that people don't want to leave. And it's true that some people don't. Some people never want to leave their homes. They are going to stay there until they die. But there are other people who desperately want out and who need help getting out. And the government really should be there to support them and give them options. So I think about these four categories. Resistance is a whole category of options, right? As I mentioned, it's not just building flood walls. It can also be dune renurshment or it can be living shorelines. And similarly, retreat is a whole suite of options. When we talk about managed treat in the United States, we tend to focus on buyouts because that's how we've tended to do managed treat in the past. But it doesn't mean it's the only option moving forward. We actually have lots of tools in the toolkit if we were willing and able to use them. So please do keep in mind that this is a whole suite of options. That said, I am going to focus on community relocations and buyouts today because those are two where we have the most experience so far. So community relocation is exactly what it sounds like. It's a whole community relocating as a community. So we've seen this historically. Well, actually throughout history, we have examples from the 1800s and 1800s and ongoing right now. Some of the most prominent examples are from Valmyre, Illinois, Pattonsburg, Missouri. A lesser known example, but one that's happening right now is Winslow, Nebraska, which is a community that is trying to relocate away from the river because they no longer want to experience repeated floods. They're trying to maintain their community. We also have examples of relocation occurring in Newtoc, Alaska. Actually, many Alaska native villages yielded on Charles in Louisiana, of course, has been in the news extensively over the last decade. And then I recently just read a story about Viola, Wisconsin, which is another community that's thinking about relocating away from the river. Yes, I know these rivers are not due to sea level rise, but the same strategies that we use to deal with property acquisitions, buyouts and community relocations in the coastal zone are the same things that we use when we're dealing with riverine flooding. So we're going to have to learn lessons from these kinds of riverine floods and these riverine relocations if we want to apply them to the coastal space. So we have these community relocations, but the challenge is that they're extremely difficult. So there is no government coordination right now and we extensively need government coordination. Robin Brone has written extensively about the need for government coordination with the Alaska native villages and their attempts to relocate, but this is true in all kinds of communities. Valmyra, Illinois had to work with 25 different state and federal agencies in order to coordinate their community relocation. And there is no centralized policy. There is no guidance. There is no assistance at the federal level right now to sort of coordinate this. So one of the main suggestions here that could be done to reform this is to have a government coordination office for community relocation. Personally, I think HUD is a better proponent for this where the location of this office than FEMA because of HUD's focus and its mission on communities and development rather than a focus on emergency response. When we think about community relocation, we want an agency that's going to take a holistic look at the needs of the community and their long-term development. Something else to consider would be changes to the Fair Housing Act that could support whole community relocations. The Fair Housing Act, although well-intentioned, has actually caused problems in relocating communities and allowing communities to relocate as communities. And so we're probably going to need some revisions there to allow exceptions for these types of relocations moving forward. There'll be a lot more that we're going to need for community relocations, but given that we have 12 minutes, I'm going to keep moving on. So buyouts. Buyouts are a program where generally what happens is that the federal government provides funding to a state and local government. The state and local government then offers to purchase homes from homeowners. The homeowners have the final say as to whether or not to sell their home. If they do sell their home, the home is removed. Sometimes it's actually physically moved, but more often it's demolished, probably because the home was damaged in the first place to have the resident be willing to move. Now these are technically voluntary, but there's been a lot of concern over homeowners who feel pressured to leave because they don't have other options. And so one of the biggest things when we think about reform in the buyout space is going to be providing homeowners with meaningful options. So people really have a choice as to what they want to do and what's best for them and for their families. Now these buyout programs have been used all across the country. They've been used by numerous different agencies, including HUD, FEMA, US Army Corps, US Department of Agriculture. States have also funded these and local funds have also been used for these buyout programs. A map just of the FEMA funded buyout programs shows that buyouts have been used in every single state except Hawaii and Hawaii is currently engaged in other types of mandatory to going on right now. So every single state in the US has used this at some scale and at some point in the last 30 years. So this isn't a new thing and this isn't something that can't be done or that we have no experience with. But what we don't have is we don't have support to match the scale of demand that we are seeing right now. And we don't have support to ensure that the people who are participating in this program are actually thriving after they engage in the buyout program. So things we're gonna need in order to change the buyout program. Apologies for a very text-laden slide here but trying to cram these all in. When we think about these reforms, very simply it needs more funding. There are waitlists, there are people on waitlists in many different states and many different communities who are waiting for buyouts. And so we need more fundings that we don't have waitlists of people who want to be bought out but can't because local government simply don't have the funding. That said, we need to provide the funding faster. Estimates by the Natural Resources Defense Council are that buyouts can take five years on average. Based on interviews I've done with practitioners, those could be two years faster if you didn't have to use federal funding, if you didn't have to jump through the federal funding hoops. Now the fact that federal funding takes two years to acquire, I think shows that it is too burdensome on the local officials and that it is not streamlined and could be a much faster and easier process. That funding needs to not be tied to disasters because being tied to disasters creates perverse incentives for local governments in how they acquire properties and when they acquire them. We also need to build local and state capacity. Right now, many communities are not applying for buyouts and are not applying for these federal programs because they simply don't have the bandwidth. They don't have enough people. When you're talking to a community who has one person working on emergency management and that person is working part-time and also has other jobs, then it's gonna be very difficult for them to try to compile hundreds or thousands of papers, pages of paperwork in order to apply for one program. So we need to streamline that process but we also need to add capacity to the local and state levels. And one suggestion I've heard here that I think could be very powerful would be providing funding for state officers, for additional state officers. So because at the state level, that state can provide additional support to the local communities rather than trying to provide support for every single local community, which might be too daunting. Certainly increasing the capacity to the state level is a very achievable goal and one that could have effect and help different local governments thrive. We also need to coordinate the multiple agencies. As I mentioned to many of these different agencies are doing buyouts, but they all run buyouts in a slightly different way with different requirements and different paperwork. Those paperwork requirements could be streamlined, they could be run on the same timeline so that someone isn't waiting six months to hear back from HUD before they can get back to FEMA with paperwork and also so that they could have common forms. So rather than having to reformat everything from the application you just sent into FEMA to turn it into HUD, we could have a common application set that would speed this up but also allow local governments to better combine funding sources from these different agencies. We also just need better funding or coordination across the agencies in general because too often we're hearing from practitioners that these agencies are actually working at cross purposes unintentionally because they are unaware of what each other are doing in these different communities. We also need to collect data on who is being, who's applying for these funds and then who's receiving them. Right now, there's almost no data collected at a household level on who is taking these. One of the big debates that has been coming out recently is racial discrimination with federal funds that are going to these communities and data on who is taking these buyouts on a racial level or an age level isn't collected. So it's unknown. We can do our best to try to figure that out at a census tract or a block level but that is always going to be less accurate than to know it at the household level. So data needs to be collected so we can understand the equity implications and so we can improve the equity implications of these programs. The same thing goes for collecting data on where people are moving to. Right now, very little data is collected on you took a buyout offer. Great, the federal government paid money the local government purchased your home and you moved where? We don't know. And because we don't know, we don't know if you are safer. We don't know if you were able to find affordable housing. We don't know if your commute becomes suddenly worse. We don't know what happened at all. And so if we want to do a thorough program evaluation of how well these programs are working we need to know where people ended up. So we need to collect that kind of information. The funding also needs to come with greater flexibility. So right now we're locked into a very simple set of property acquisition rules and that actually creates problems for local governments when they have to deal with unusual circumstances and unusual circumstances always come up because communities across the US coast are very different. We're trying to apply a one size fits all policy to all different types of diverse coastal communities and it doesn't work. So we need to allow greater flexibility. Very simple examples here would be to acquire different types of property acquisition. So not just a fee simple acquisition of we are now on the property entirely but also something like a life estate or a conservation acquisition or a density development acquisition and also to adapt to different types of hazards. So not just flooding but how could we also use this program to deal with wildfire or coastal erosion or other hazards that are currently less supported through these programs. We also need to offer replacement value. This one means that instead of offering you what the market might pay for your home I should pay you what you would need to buy a comparable home outside of the floodplain. Those two numbers might be very, very different. And so but they would very much affect your ability to take that buyout and to move into a safe home and to thrive after the buyout. So we need to be thinking about how we can offer replacement costs rather than fair market value. Finally tied to that is one of the major challenges with these buyout programs is that people if they take the buyout where are they going to move? And particularly when these buyouts occur in areas that have lower value housing there's a real concern that if there's not additional affordable housing somewhere else in the community that people may not be able to stay in the community and they may end up being displaced out of their community entirely not just off the coast but out of the community. That is a solvable problem if we can think about where affordable housing goes. And so just a reminder that this larger discussion about coasts and the civil rise and adaptation is also a conversation about affordable housing and where that housing gets developed. And then finally because we've been discussing nature based strategies and land use the idea that after these buyouts occur and the government owns the land there needs to be a plan and there needs to be funding in place to be able to turn that land into something useful whether that's a wetland or a living shoreline or a park for the community. But something so that it actually benefits the people in the community that is around. Right now, most often after these buyouts the land is not used. It is not put to good use primarily because local and state governments don't have financing in order to go forward the cost of turning a lot into say a reclaimed wetland or turning it into a park. And so providing funds to be able to make this land meaningful would really support communities in being able to turn this to a beneficial use. And all in there, thanks. Exciters, let me invite our other panelists to turn their videos on and we will commence Q&A. This was a great set of presentations and I'm really excited to dig into some of these topics. And Susan, it's been a while since we've heard from you. So I'm gonna direct this first question at you and then we'll go through the order sort of of presentations. Something that's come up in multiple presentations is sort of where local governments involved or state governments involved or federal governments involved. And I think C-level rise, we talk about it as though it's one size fits all and that's something that the four of you have absolutely made clear that that's not the case. How could federal policy really be designed to accommodate the local by local, state by state differences that we see in and how the coasts are used and sort of the different impacts that might affect one coast versus another. Yeah, thank you for that. And it's absolutely true that there is no one size fits all. I think we need to think about maybe a few ways that the federal government can address that. One is helping to provide information so that we do understand even just the physical differences of what C-level rise looks like in some of these places. And I think CIDR's point on demographics is also a good one, land use and other community pieces. So I think one sort of information provision and understanding the context is important. I also think allowing for local information provision is important. So often local academic institutions or communities have their own information that they wanna put into the mix. And I think it's important that the federal government consider that. I also think programs in some ways should be designed so that there is sort of a minimum incentive or requirement to make sure that these issues are included but they shouldn't legislate like you have to raise a house two feet because that may not be appropriate in every context for a whole variety of reasons. So understanding like that in a setting the parameters that we have to make sure that we are accommodating C-level rise that here's the type of information we need but then a range of solutions that does that is going to be important. And I think you can write your regulations, your program kind of requirements and eligibility such that you're allowing the states or local communities to basically answer those questions for themselves. And again, it always comes down to kind of community needs and community desires and understanding what it is that's going to work in those places. Thanks, Robin. I would build on that and say the coordination role that CIDR has raised is a very important one that the federal government, if you will, has sort of the bird's eye view of what's going on across dimensions, across state lines, across community lines. So coordinating and streamlining also a very important thing that the government can do but also setting general standards. So I mentioned the Coastal Zone Management Act that's a program where states have to come up with plans for their own coastal zone. It has a lot of flexibility to address local conditions. And if you're thinking like California, San Diego is a very different coastal space than Northern California. So even within the state, there's a lot of variety. And yet the Act imposes standards that says, hey, you have to think about these things. We could be adding some things that have to be thought about into those Coastal Zone Management Plans. That also provides technical assistance. That's another very important role that the federal government plays in helping with that infrastructure. We have state revolving funds that are funded in part by the federal government. We're getting a lot of new infrastructure funding, put, you know, rethinking some of the conditions that go on that and some of the uses that they can be put to both ways. Sometimes they are used to fund projects that should not be funded. You know, the basic point, we shouldn't be building more in the floodplain. But sometimes they can't be used for things that seem related and are critical needs and should be used. You know, we amended also the Coastal Zone Management Act to deal with non-point source problem, pollution problems in the coastal zone. There are other considerations we can put into that. So providing the funding, providing the coordination, providing the technical assistance, making clear what works in different situations so that not every community or state has to reinvent the wheel. These are all critically important government, federal government functions. So just to build on what Robin said and I agree with everything, is, you know, given my view here on nature-based solutions is trying to make sure that as we pull together this coordination and address the stove piping of all these issues that nature-based solutions are part of that because often they are not part of that conversation. Yet they can be very valuable part of the solution. And I think that, you know, a piece of this too is, you know, the community preferred alternatives, like making sure that across all of these programs that it's part of the conversation and that they are incorporated in, whether they are, you know, about their housing or about, you know, the places they go fish or whatever these pieces are to build them all together. So I'll just add that small piece and turn it over. Yeah, I just, so I completely agree with the idea that we need community tailoring. So I like this combination of the idea of setting standards, as Robin mentions, and then having community tailoring to, you know, what works in these local areas. That said, I do think that some of this is going to require changes to the incentive structure because right now what communities often want financially is to build expensive homes in the floodplain because that's what benefits local governments in the short term. And frankly, right now that can benefit them even in the long-term given that federal, that feds will pay 75% or more of the disaster cost afterwards. So there's some great research, Linda Chey and others have been doing on the financial incentives for local governments to build in these areas. And so I think, yes, we want to do what communities want to do, but we also need to make sure that the incentive structure is there so that what communities want doesn't create more problems either for the feds, for other communities or for the community itself longer term. So some sort of, I don't know, yeah, guide rails there have to be changed. That makes a lot of sense. We're coming up on the half hour mark, which is the end. So I'm gonna request that we sort of, we're gonna go through a couple more questions and I'm gonna request that we use sort of a lightning round format. But the first one I really want to get to, again, this is something that the four of you sort of brought up in your presentations and I think it's really important. So I'd like to revisit it. And that is how we ensure that what we do going forward to address sea level rise is equitable and doesn't contribute to increasingly disproportionate impacts on disadvantaged communities, frontline communities, environmental justice communities. So Susan, maybe we'll start back with you at the top of the rundown. But I'm curious, as Congress starts to think about sort of what it might do, what are a couple of the key considerations you would encourage them to think about as they're crafting strategies, as they're crafting policies that balance, you know, all of these various considerations that we've talked about today. So I'll give, I guess, maybe three just really quick points. One is participation and making sure that that is a necessary part of any of these programs. Two is funding, because I think a lot of these communities just capacity to do this work, whether it's the technical work they used to be done or the actual moving is really critical. And so how do you provide funding? And the third is, how do we evaluate federal programs at this sort of mega levels? If you think about things like cost benefit analysis that's used for core programs, you know, that naturally lends itself to places where property values are really high. And yet that may not be, and in fact, probably isn't where most people live or certainly where the most vulnerable live. And yet that's where federal dollars are gonna go based on those types of analyses. So three quick answers. I've never heard anyone criticize the Army Course Cost Benefit Analysis. That's interesting. I guess I've maybe haven't been doing briefings longer, but Robin, please go ahead. I echo the cost benefit analysis and how we prioritize with a general recognition that there is a distinct likelihood, I would say, without substantial change, that it is the poor racially diverse communities that are already overburdened with toxics and disease who are going to be left holding the bag with the least valuable properties and no means to go anywhere. So regardless of the economics, that should be a priority to help those communities out. And I just wanna build on the kind of benefit cost issue because I think it's a bit broader than just for projects. It's a question of how we like kind of our framework for looking at this. Instead of looking at like disproportionate harms or harms to these communities, you really need to be looking like how do we benefit these communities? And I think, you know, our metrics really mattered for this right now. And Susan said we can't just do it based on home value. And so how do we think about the multiple social and environmental benefits and incorporate those into the decision frameworks that we use? Yeah, I'll 100% agree with the cost benefit and the larger issue here, which is a larger issue of right now, our adaptation and disaster policy is framed around protecting property value. It is not framed around protecting people and it's not framed around protecting communities or anything else that people actually care about. So that needs to switch. Like we need to start caring about people more than we care about property value. And so just at a larger scale, like that needs to happen. And then for the equity issues, I think we really have to foreground them. This can't be a, hey, we made this policy, now let's try to make it equitable. It has to be, how will we address equity? Okay, what are the projects we're gonna work on? And so that's gonna require and also an explicit reframing of how do we think about equity in a totally different way that isn't just shoehorned in at the end, but is sort of the fundamental starting point. Thanks for that. Lydia and you are, maybe we'll start with you and we'll go through the list or we'll go through the roster. You brought up nature-based solutions and that's something that we've covered extensively in EESI, something we get asked about a lot, nature-based solutions. Sometimes they're general, what are they? How can they be alternatives to traditional infrastructure? Sometimes they're very specific. What are the specific benefits of blue carbon, for example? I'm curious, why aren't there more nature-based solutions? And maybe the fairer way to put it is what are some of the barriers that are preventing more nature-based solutions from being implemented where sea level rises a challenge? Great question. I think there are a number of barriers that have been raised and that need to be addressed. So one of them is just lack of awareness. So a lot of the folks making decisions, whether they're federal, state or local, don't really know about these nature-based solutions and the benefits they can provide and how they can find resources to fund them. And in some cases, there's insufficient funding and the funding streams are not set up right. So they might fund a shovel-ready project, but they don't fund the planning and the monitoring and the maintenance that's required. So that's kind of missing. There are also places where we're still learning how these different nature-based solutions work and how to kind of create standards for putting them in place, so that needs to happen. And I also feel like for agriculture and forestry, we kind of have this whole infrastructure for like a cultivation science and we have Ag extension and we have all these things and we're gonna need to create that for nature-based solutions if we're going to want them at scale. So we really need to provide that kind of support system for building and creating nature-based solutions. So those are just some. Siners, happy to give you the next word and then maybe we'll hear from Susan and we'll give Robin the concluding thoughts on barriers to nature-based solutions. Yeah, so totally agree, awareness is a huge issue, capacity is a big issue. The other thing to just apply a lawn on the cost-benefit analysis, but we did interviews with local coastal officials in California asking why they weren't using funds for nature-based strategies and a lot of them were, well, we don't know how to fit that into a cost-benefit analysis. And I know there's been trainings on this and there's been more information, but at some point we sat down with like 16 officials, like experts and tried to walk through the process of applying for funding for this and we couldn't figure it out. And we realized that like if you have, you shouldn't need two decades of experience in trying to apply for funding to get funding or if you do, that's a really significant barrier to getting funding to places, right? And so we need to build that expertise, but we also need to simplify the process and find ways to help people do this. You know, and those are solvable problems if people are incentivized to solve them. Yeah, and I just, I mean related, it's the same point that Lydia raised earlier too, of like we're not valuing necessarily everything that nature is providing. And so when you fit it into a cost-benefit box, you may not actually be valuing the entire piece of that system. The other thing I'll say is, you know, starting with engineering schools, we need to talk about nature-based solutions. And so when engineers learn about coastal protection, this should be side-by-side in the curriculum. And I'll just throw in two more really quickly as part of the perception problem. If you're a coastal city, you might not see room for a nature-based solution literally because the coast is so hardened. And second, nature-based solutions in people I have encountered overlaps with the endangered species acts hammer and maybe those need to get decoupled a little more in people's minds than they are that it's not a forced play like the endangered species act can be. Right, thank you. I'm afraid that's where we'll have to leave it. Susan, Robin, Lydia, and Siders, thank you so much for being great panelists today. This is a really, really important topic and we appreciate all of your expertise and perspectives on sea level rise as part of our living with climate change briefing series. So thank you so much for joining us today. If you liked the presentations, if you wanna go back and revisit any of the presentations as a reminder to our audience, everything will be available online at www.esi.org, including lots of additional resources and archived webcast and eventually our summary notes. So just like to say thank you one last time to our panelists. Also very special thanks to Representative Caster who joined us at the beginning of the briefing with some introductory remarks. Thanks to her for making time and thanks to her great staff for helping facilitate the connectivity there. I'd also like to take a moment to thank everyone here at ESI behind the scenes who makes these briefings possible. I'll start with Dan O'Brien, then Omri Emma, Allison, Anna and Savannah, lots and lots and lots of hard work going to these briefings. While these panelists seem very high profile, they have to be tracked down like crazy and really corralled and convinced and cajoled. So it's a lot of work to bring these briefings together and pull these briefings together. So thanks to the great staff here at ESI. This is also the first briefing of our summer intern term. And so we have Christina, Stephanie and Aubie joining us today for their first ever ESI briefing that we many, many more in the coming months, lots and lots of summary notes that they'll be working on. So thanks to our new summer interns for their contributions as well. My colleague Dan O'Brien just put up a slide with a link to a survey. If anyone in our audience has two minutes to participate in our survey, we'd really appreciate the feedback. We read every response, it means a lot. If there are any audio issues, video issues, technical issues, you might have noticed that we've been experimenting with closed captioning to help make our briefings more accessible. If you have any comments at all, ideas for future topics, please let us know and survey is a great way to do that. One last plug, we have a lot of briefings coming up, including next Wednesday with direct air capture. We'll be looking at wildfires. We'll be looking at extreme heat. We'll be looking at offshore wind, even charger buildout, almost too many briefings. Not that there's such a thing as too many briefings, but we have a lot of briefings coming up. Be a real shame if anyone missed them. And the best way to keep up with everything we do is to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. So even if you can't make a briefing, if you RSVP, that ensures that you get all of the great materials that will come out after the fact. We'll go ahead and end it there. I hope everyone enjoys the rest of your Wednesday. Thanks again to our great panelists. Thanks to Representative Castor and her staff for her participation today. And we will see you next week for direct air capture. Thanks so much, everyone.