Pathways for Managed Retreat – A New INC Project

October 19, 2017 | Cities, Climate Adaptation, Innovation Network for Communities, Managed Retreat, Sea Level Rise, Urban Climate Innovation
by John Cleveland

We're starting a new project, with support of the Summit Foundation--to look more closely at the challenge of "managed retreat" by cities vulnerable to sea level rise and other climate impacts. Your thoughts and examples welcome.

There is not the slightest doubt that beachfront development will retreat on a massive scale, though widespread recognition of this and serious planning for it are lacking. . . .The sooner we recognize the truth about nature’s intentions at the shoreline, the better. Neither time nor tide is in our favor.

--Retreat from a Rising Sea: Hard Choices in an Age of Climate Change[1]

 Managed retreat is widely considered to be a “third rail” of local politics—there is great peril in touching it, even in discussing it. There are good reasons for this: The idea of retreat undercuts the conventional urban narrative of development and growth, and the related public revenues and economic activity that are generated, as the path to urban wellbeing. It also raises the specter of government “taking” of private property. Depending on the actions that local government takes, property owners can suffer significant losses of asset value. Intentional retreat involves long-term changes to city land uses and more advance planning. It has significant equity and fairness implications: how do you decide which places are “worth” saving, which are not, and who should bear the costs? Its value is undercut by perverse incentives in government flood insurance programs and private insurance financial risk management. Finally, authority to enact the practices of retreat—policies, regulations, subsidies, etc.—is fragmented among levels of government and is filled with legal uncertainties as well as subject to scientific uncertainty about potential climate impacts. “Retreat is at present mostly a legal theory,” note J. Peter Byrne and Jessica Grannis in a chapter, “Coastal Retreat Measures,” for an American Bar Association publication. “Few retreat policies have been implemented on the ground.”[2]

Yet, more and more cities are finding themselves responding to real and crippling climate changes or anticipating and planning for these in their future—and having to decide where they will permit what to be built under what conditions. Even not deciding is a type of decision with consequences.

It’s not hard to recognize that as the emerging urban climate adaptation field of practice matures, it will need to develop practical knowledge about why managed retreat makes sense, what managed retreat involves, and how managed retreat can be enacted by cities

The focus of this project is the “what” of managed retreat. We intend to frame the multiple pathways that cities take to deciding what they want to do about using managed retreat as a city strategy for addressing climate change risks. And we will identify the city capacities needed to prepare, make, and implement decisions about which pathway(s) to take.

A preliminary, rudimentary look at the practice of managed retreat suggests three general, prevailing pathways:

• Do Nothing About At-Risk Development. Cities let the insurance, financial, and other markets (or another level of government) address the problems of vulnerability and loss.
• Defend/Armor At-Risk Development. Cities invest in increased climate protections that reduce vulnerability of high-risk areas.
• Starve At-Risk Development. Cities buy and remove existing development and/or eliminate infrastructure support in high-risk areas.

Using this initial framing of pathways, the project will develop a more finely differentiated, nuanced set of pathways that cities are using or could be using. For each pathway the project will identify the city-based capacities needed to make pathway decisions. We will initially frame the capacities along the lines of the 7 capacities identified in INC’s March 2017 “Essential Capacities for Urban Climate Adaptation” report:

• Scientific Foundation
• Communications
• Equitable Adaptation
• Inclusive Community Engagement
• Intergovernmental Alignment
• Technical Design
• Financial Resources

Here, too, we expect to produce a more finely grained, nuanced version of capacities for managed retreat. For example, the capacity to manage legal challenges to managed retreat may loom larger than in our more general framing of urban adaptation capacities.

We believe that framing the pathways and capacities in this way will provide two kinds of value. It will help others in the urban climate adaptation field who are developing tools and other knowledge for cities. The project report will also be made available directly to cities, hundreds of which are in various stages of developing and implementing climate adaptation plans.

[1] Orrin H.Pilkey, Kinda Pilkey-Jarvis, and Keith C. Pilkey, Retreat from a Rising Sea: Hard Choices in an Age of Climate Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 164-165.

[2] J. Peter Byrne and Jessica Grannis, “Coastal Retreat Measures,” chapter 9.