Each of these cities has had to find its own way to public and private financial resources, because there is no system in place for solving the problem of how to pay for climate resilience—no cost-sharing arrangements, for instance, for resilience infrastructure across local, state, and federal levels of government. The cities are involuntary pioneers faced with growing climate hazards and exposure that require more money for resilience.

Examining these cities’ pathways revealed common strategies that, while only reflecting the leading-edge of urban climate-resilience financing practices, quite likely foreshadow what other cities already or may do. These strategies form the content of Playbook 1.0. But the pathways also suggest the limits of what cities are able to do, with important implications for the continuing evolution of the urban playbook for climate-resilience finance.

Playbook 1.0 Strategies;

1. Generate Local Revenue. Producerevenue for government climate-resilience public infrastructure by taxing local property owners and charging utility ratepayers.
2. Impose Land-Use Costs. Adopt land-use and building regulations and policies that place undetermined future resilience-building costs on property owners and developers, rather than on government.
3. Embed Resilience Standards into Future Infrastructure Investments. Ensure that all future capital spending for public infrastructure will be designed to strengthen climate resilience as much as possible.
4. Leverage Development Opportunities. Link resilience-building projects with real estate development opportunities to generate public-private partnerships that invest in both public infrastructure and private development.
5. Exploit Federal Funding Niches.Identify resilience-friendly federal funding streams and develop projects that fit pre- and post-disaster program requirements.
6. Tap State Government. Mine existing state programs, or seek to modify them, to obtain funds for local climate-resilience efforts.
7. Develop Financial Innovations. Explore the use of innovative mechanisms for generating public and private revenue for climate-resilience projects, including district-scale financial structures.
8. Pursue Equity in Resilience. Factorsocial and economic equity into funding and financing actions by serving economic development, housing, and other needs while investing in climate resilience.

The post New INC Report: Playbook 1.0: How Cities Are Paying for Climate Resilience appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

As mounting destruction by rising seas, hurricanes, and wildfires drives the dangers of climate change deeper into public awareness, more and more US cities are trying to figure out how to strengthen their resilience against climate shocks and stresses. They are using two approaches to protect public infrastructure and private property from climate risks: Armoring—building physical barriers to flooding, for instance—reduces the exposure of physical assets and people to climate hazards. Accommodating—raising roads and building sites, for example—alters physical assets to reduce their vulnerability to climate hazards.

But few cities are using, or even considering, a third approach known as “managed retreat.” This approach uses public policies, including regulations, investments, and incentives to remove existing development—buildings, infrastructure, entire neighborhoods—over time and prevent future development in parts of the city that cannot, should not, or will not be armored or accommodated for potentially devastating climate hazards. (See Appendix for an inventory of tools cities use for managed retreat.)

It’s not hard to understand why managed retreat is overlooked: it is an irrational decision under the current rules of the urban-development game. Cities are their development: housing for residents; stores, offices, factories, and warehouses for businesses; transportation, water, energy, and waste infrastructure for everyone. Existing development provides enormous financial value for owners and businesses and a large portion of a city government’s revenue. New development generates profits for developers, investors, and lenders and boosts the local economy. It signals that the city is attracting people and investment, indicators of urban health.

City leaders can foresee that considering retreat would produce substantial political, financial, and emotional pain locally—an array of immediate and intimidating difficulties with little gain in the short run. Property owners and real estate developers will worry that retreat will reduce the value of their assets; some will accuse the city of trampling on their private property rights, People will refuse to abandon their homes, businesses, and neighborhoods, citing a deep attachment to place and neighbors. Civic leaders will be concerned that retreat will shake public confidence in the city’s future. Renters will fear they will be displaced and left with no affordable housing options. City officials will be uneasy about losing future property tax revenue when private development is eliminated and future development is prohibited. And so on.

The inclination to avoid retreat is strong even in cities that have undergone a destructive climate disaster; the civic reflex of city leaders is almost always to rebuild everything as it was. After Hurricane Sandy pounded New York City in 2012, for instance, then-mayor Michael Bloomberg declared that “we cannot and will not abandon our waterfront. It’s one of our greatest assets. We must protect it, not retreat from it.”[i]

But these calculations are changing.

This report examines the role that managed retreat will increasingly play as more and more cities wrestle with how to deal with the growing risks of destructive climate changes. It is organized around three insights:

1. Many cities will not be able to avoid retreat, but they can choose what kind of retreat to have. Whether or not to retreat is a false choice for cities facing certain climate risks such as rising seas. Politicians don’t want to make decisions about who gets protected from climate risks and who doesn’t, notes David Titley, head of the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk at the University of Pennsylvania. “We saw this in New York with Mayor Bloomberg. ‘We don’t retreat.’ Well, guess what. The ocean gets a vote.”[ii]The question is which of three kinds of retreat will occur in the city: traumatic post-disaster retreat; chaotic, market-driven retreat; or forward-looking planned retreat. In this light, the alternatives to managed retreat may be “greater evils” that cities will want to avoid.
2. There is an emerging roadmap for generating community acceptance of managed retreat as part of building a city’s climate resilience. The limited experience of cities that have taken on managed retreat suggests that an effective process depends on critical actions that move the community from denial and anger to acceptance. It’s especially important to reframe retreat as not simply a loss of what was, but as part of a larger and inspiring vision for what can be, for the city’s future. Five lessons learned are:

• A city’s community-engagement process for resilience planning should be designed for the emotional and social aspects of considering managed retreat.
• A city’s assessment of its climate risks and vulnerabilities should expose, not hide, the potential implications for retreat.
• Cities should reframe retreat as not just a loss, but as part of a positive and inspiring vision for the city’s long-term development and success.
• A city can help to normalize retreat by starting with the relocation of essential public infrastructure and revising city rules that steer new development.
• Consideration of retreat should include recognition of its potential impacts on economic and social disparities in the city.

3. Until more cities seriously consider using managed retreat, it is unlikely that crucial support from state and federal governments will occur on other than a sporadic, special-case basis. Retreat can involve implementation challenges that cities cannot resolve by themselves, such as legal, regulatory, financial, and planned resettlement concerns. So far, though, state and federal governments mostly treat retreat as a unique episode, usually only responding after a climate disaster. They have not institutionalized policies and resources that cities can rely on for managed retreat—nor has a critical mass of cities pushed for such policy changes.

Download report

[i]Sarah Crean, “Bloomberg: No Retreat From The Coastline,” Gotham Gazette, June 12, 2013, https://www.adaptny.org/2013/06/12/no-retreat-from-the-coastline/.

[ii]Laura Parker, “Who’s Still Fighting Climate Change? The U.S. Military,” National Geographic, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/pentagon-fights-climate-change-sea-level-rise-defense-department-military/.

The post New INC Report: Can It Happen Here? Improving the Prospect of Managed Retreat by US Cities appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

RESILIENCE FINANCE WILL GO MAINSTREAM.

From the Climate Bonds Initiative to the Global Adaptation and Resilience Investment WorkGroup, finance sector experts are working to create mechanisms in the financial markets that make it more likely that assets under management will include more climate change resilience projects. That’s important, since the gap in resilience finance, which the Climate Policy Initiative doggedly tracks annually, grows wider. Creating principles for resilience-related green bonds is a high priority in the growing climate bond field.

RESILIENCE FUNDING WILL INCREASE.

Both the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Federal Emergency Management Agency received increased mitigation-related appropriations, in part through the “Disaster Recovery Reform Act.” Going forward, FEMA can use 6 percent of its Disaster Relief Fund on pre-disaster mitigation and HUD allocated $28 billion to support long-term disaster recovery in nine states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands with $16 billion earmarked for risk mitigation. Rules and guidelines for accessing these competitive grants are on the agencies’ 2019 to-do list.

CLIMATE CHANGE-DRIVEN MIGRATION WILL BE BETTER ORGANIZED.

Even as Louisiana grapples with the ongoing migration of families from their southern parishes because of climate-related issues (e.g., in Plaquemine Parish, 67 percent of the population left between 2000 and 2015), it and other states seek ways to create capacity and opportunity in receiving communities. We even have a term for this change:“Climigration.” It was coined by Robin Bronen, executive director of theAlaska Institute for Justice,to replace the commonly used misnomer “climate refugee.”

RESILIENCE NEWS WILL BECOME MORE UBIQUITOUS.

The resilience-related news cycle will grow, driven by growing tragedies that define the resilience gap. Last year’s National Climate Assessment spotlighted the costs we already are experiencing:

• Flooding along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in 2011, triggered by heavy rainfall, caused an estimated $5.7 billion in costs.
• Drought in 2012 caused widespread agricultural losses to crops and livestock, and low water levels along the Mississippi River affected transportation of goods. resulting in an estimated $33 billion in losses.
• Annual federal firefighting costs have ranged from $809 million to $2.1 billion per year between 2000 and 2016.

Experts in many sectors now assert how climate change risk is impacting their goals, resulting, for instance, in a 10-fold increase in my resilience-related Google feed – the source of many of my tweets the past year.

RURAL AMERICA WILL CONTINUE TO BEAR THE BRUNT OF CATASTROPHIC LOSS.

Many Americans still live, work and play in smaller towns and cities where most climate change-related tragedy strikes – from Paradise, California, to Mexico Beach, Florida. Resources focused on smaller communities, such as Flood Forum USA and Online Help and Advice for Natural Disasters, are going to be even more in demand.

Are you detecting other resilience-related trends? Please let me know. Contact me on Twitter.

This oped originally appeared in Triple Pundit https://www.triplepundit.com/story/2019/five-resilience-trends-watch-2019/82001

Image credit: Bureau of Land Management/Flickr

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Purpose

This research project’s purpose is to identify ways to accelerate the development and growth of public and private financial resources that US cities can use to implement climate resilience plans and projects. Cities often cite access to capital as a major barrier to the implementation of their climate resilience plans.

 Findings

Climate risks disrupt city financing.Cities use multiple, well-established public and private systems to pay for their public responsibilities, but these systems do not have the ability to meet the challenges of financing the mounting climate resilience needs of cities. Barriers include:

• Insufficient publicrevenue for climate resilience projects.
• New and uncertain financial risks posed by climate changes.
• Inherent imbalances between the burdens and benefits of climate resilience projects.
• Misaligned public policies and markets.
• Resilience projects that fall outside of traditional municipal jurisdictions.

Emerging innovations in climate resilience finance do not sum to a system-building approach.A growing number of developments seek to address barriers and opportunities in climate resilience financing. We identified 30 of these [Table 1], but they are mostly “one-off” innovations and changes made by an individual city or financial institution or insurer for a specific project or financial mechanism. Most of these efforts are largely disconnected from each other. The public and private sector players engaged in climate resilience finance efforts do not have a shared vision, framework, or strategies for developing, as quickly as possible, a comprehensive, large-scale urban climate resilience financial system. The set of innovations does provide a great deal of the research-and-development that could evolve into a more systemic and impactful stage of change.

A system for city climate resilience finance would contain three key elements:*

• City transaction capabilities, including adaptation planning, adaptation investment planning, governance arrangements at metro-region and city district scales; and public revenue sources and funding mechanisms.
• State and federal government policies, including: adaptation planning requirements and support; climate resilience standards; flexible governance structure frameworks; insurance market regulations and public “last resort” insurance policy; and grants and loans for city adaptation projects.
• Financial, insurance, and real estate market capacities, including products and services; risk assessment and disclosure; risk pricing; and lending and investment standards.

Recommendation

Development of an urban climate resilience financial system can be accelerated and expanded through collaborations of cities, state and federal governments, and real estate, insurance, and financial markets, as well as community-based sectors such as health care and utilities, that prioritize, design, and implement system-building solutions.

Given the highly distributed nature of the system that exists and needs to be developed, cities—as the entities directly facing the financing challenge—are the only players with an overriding interest in developing all of the elements of a climate resilience financial system. But they would need support and resources from their partner organizations, other sectors and levels of government, as well as philanthropy, to help lead and sustain such an effort.

A starting point for developing a system-building collaborative approach would be to organize cities to link, learn, and align with each other, and act in concert with relevant private sectors and other levels of government to develop and implement projects that build a climate resilience financial system.

The post Research Report: Toward a Climate Resilience Financial System for US Cities appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

Hence the rise of adaptation finance, which World Resources Institute has said is necessary as “poor rural areas are frequently the most in need of financial support to strengthen their resilience to climate change, yet they often have the fewest financial resources available.”

To that end, a key question was asked at “Resilience Day” during this week’s Global Climate Action Summit: how do we scale finance for adaptation?”

The question and responses are critically important because, as noted by Barbara Buchner, executive director of the Climate Policy Initiative, finance for climate adaptation in 2017 amounted to just $22 billion vs. $382 billion for climate mitigation.

Here are five answers based on input from several players in the adaptation investment field. These leaders include Sanjay Wagle, managing director of the private socially driven equity investment firm The Lightsmith Group; Dr. Buchner and Kirsten Dunlop, CEO of the European Union’s Climate-KIC; Kathy Baughman-McLeod, senior vice president of Global Environmental & Social Risk, Bank of America; and Mari Yoshitaka, chief consultant for the Clean Energy Finance Division of Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities. For adaptation finance to work and ensure resilience, the following must occur:

1. Get the adaptation-related policies right. Regulatory uncertainties hinder investors. Especially since finance flow is mostly domestic, investors care about predictability. Nonprofits, bilateral agencies and academic institutions can assist sovereigns with regulatory improvements.
2. Borrow innovative finance solutions from other sectors, including the vanilla approach of ensuring all government investments are adaptive to climate risk, as well as insurance-linked securities, green bonds and other scalable and replicable means.The International Finance Corporation and other multilateral investment banks can further this work, increasing their emphasis on adaptation from a historic emphasis on mitigation.
3. Move toward a globally accepted standard for resilience finance including language on the use of proceeds so the market grows with each investment. Commercial and investment banks should be part of this standard-setting, with engagement from the Financial Stability Board and others.
4. Create facilities, starting in markets easy for investors’ participation, where a blend of philanthropy, impact capital, development finance and regular market capital invests in products and where projects can be wrapped and warehoused for their marketability. Focus especially on multiplying the scant grant resources in ways that inspire more adaptation finance, not just one improved project. Philanthropies, development banks and green investment banks are part of this solution.
5. Make the existing knowledge about profitable adaptation solutions much more widely known, since investors remain unaware of opportunities in this space. All adaptation thought leaders need to make this a priority, turning risks into investment opportunities.

As the Summit comes and goes underway, it is important that we strive to ensure these five directives can help scale up climate adaptation.

This article originally appeared in Triple Pundit.

The post Five Adaptation Finance Tips That Can Help Build Resilience Worldwide appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

Real estate risk from the physical impacts of climate change.”

That’s how Neil Pegram, Director of Americas with GRESB, a global investor-driven benchmark organization that tracks real estate portfolios’ environmental, social and governance performance, welcomed attendees at GRESB’s affiliate event at last week’s Global Climate Action Summit.

Pegram was noting how slow the real estate industry has been in turning its attention to the impact of climate change on real assets, even though climate resistance has become an investment imperative in a sector where such investments often are held for a decade or longer.

It seemed apropos that the GRESB event was taking place as the East Coast prepared for Hurricane Florence’s anticipated wrath and as the real estate industry absorbs the news that 2017’s natural disasters caused an estimated $220 billion in property and infrastructure damage – two-thirds of the $330 billion in global economic losses, figures Munich RE.

In March, GRESB released a new resilience module, an optional supplement to the GRESB Real Estate and Infrastructure Assessments. It is a significant improvement over the paltry resilience checkbox that GRESB included in prior benchmark frameworks.

GRESB leaders acknowledged it was the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) recommendation that information related to governance, risk management, strategy, and performance metrics be disclosed that caused them to fortify the resilience benchmark.

Several real estate investors in attendance described their portfolio’s resilience – and they reinforced the view that an industry awakening has begun. Nina James, General Manager, Corporate Sustainability, for Investa said that resilience generally is considered a “mega trend” and investors place it in the category of a “taking a long-term bet.” Like technology, climate change is viewed as a disruption that influences thinking and begs questions about what effective asset stewardship should look like.

Martin Kholmatov, Senior Responsible Investment Specialist at AIMCo, acknowledged that a new set of stresses and shocks exists.  “They make us wonder, how is the business model going to evolve.” He said, adding that he and others think that “a proxy for good management is looking at ESG [Environment, Social and Governance] issues.”

Romilly Madew, representing Australia’s Green Building Council, noted that a growing number of investors ask about resilience. “We tell our members to deal with resilience now and be prepared because investors are going to ask,” she explained.

And Michelle Bachir of Deloitte pointed out that the firm’s advisory clients “are wondering what to put out there to make it decision useful for investors.  Our clients want to portray their leadership in the space. This is an exciting time.”

But GRESB’s data don’t completely confirm this positive tone. Only 13 percent of Real Estate Assessment GRESB responders – just over 100 firms – submitted information for the resilience module. The vast majority reported on only 20 percent of the resilience module, a poor showing indeed.

Adam Kirkman, Head of ESG at AMP Capital struck a conservative note by asking, “Where is the right time to pull the lever to future proof an asset based on risks down the track….What is the financial engineering resilience required?” He also pointed out that benchmarking is for the current real estate portfolio, while resilience decision-making needs to be built into new assets, too.

Ari Frankel, Sustainability & High-Performance Buildings, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. put a fine point on the challenge beyond GRESB.  Unlike other reporting frameworks such as GRI that requires quantification of progress and check boxes relating pastinformation, TCFD is “transformative, because you are asking investors to look at forward-looking, qualitative and scenario-based uncertainty.”

Let’s hope these real estate mavens attended the actual Global Climate Action Summit. They would have heard from leaders as varied as James Lee Witt, former FEMA director and current advisor to Fortune 500 companies; Lionel Johnson Jr., mayor of St. Gabriel, La.; former U.S. Vice President Al Gore; Henk Ovink, Special Envoy for International Water Affairs for the Kingdom of the Netherlands; and Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. They warned that the real estate sector’s ongoing drive for coastal development was on a collision course with climate risk, imperiling real estate assets and humans.

The UNFCCC’s 3rd Biennial Assessment and Overview of Climate Finance Flows released in April — a month after GRESB’s resilience module – calculates that real estate assets at risk in 2070 will be $35 trillion (total value).  Now that’s mind-blowing.

This article originally appeared on Triple Pundit

Image credit: NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory

The post Weathering the Storm: Real Estate Climate Resilience (Finally) Gets Attention appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

What is the prospect of managed retreat becoming a prevailing practice among US cities that are faced with likely unmanageable future climate impacts? As we continue to study this question, we’ve developed a hypothesis of how this might come about: the potential negative impact of chaotic retreat driven by market dynamics in response to climate risks and disasters is the most likely factor that will lead cities to consider and embrace managed retreat as a viable approach.

We define urban managed retreat as the use of public policies, including regulation and investment, to over time eliminate or prevent development in places at significant risk of recurrent or permanent damage or destruction from climate effects or places needed in a less developed or undeveloped condition in order to protect other development that is at significant climate risk.

We see managed retreat as one of five approaches to climate resilience that cities can use to reduce the potential of physical, environmental, economic, and social damage from climate changes. Cities may use these approaches in various combinations.

But for a number of reasons. managed retreat is the last resort of cities, if it is considered at all. Eliminating existing or future development raises particular issues:

• Displacement. Where will displaced people and businesses relocate and what is the city’s responsibility to facilitate relocation?
• Property Acquisition. How much money will the city have to pay to acquire the right to eliminate privately owned development, which may be legally required?
• Lost Public Revenue. How much will city revenue be reduced when taxable private development is eliminated or prevented in the future?
• Political and Community Opposition. How will people who depend on existing development or count on future development targeted for retreat react to the plans, and how will civic leaders and the public react to a retreat approach?

Our research has turned now to these questions:

1. To what extent do US cities face climate risks that cannot be sufficiently addressed through other approaches?
2. To what extent are and will market dynamics (e.g., unavailability and pricing of insurance) trigger chaotic retreat?
3. In what ways would managed retreat be better for a city’s well-being than chaotic retreat?

You thoughts on these questions–and links to information and studies–would be greatly appreciated.

The post Will Market Forces Prompt Cities to Manage Retreat from Climate Risks? appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

But these raters don’t assess a city’s viability in the era of climate change. They don’t ask if cities like Boston, Paris, Shanghai, or Rio de Janeiro will be well prepared for the most disruptive weather that is likely to occur. Or if cities like San Francisco, Copenhagen, Mexico City, or Sydney are well on their way to de-carbonizing their energy supply, or putting the needs of pedestrians, bicyclists, and mass-transit riders ahead of the needs of cars, or rapidly greening their building stock, or minimizing consumption of materials and the unnecessary creation of waste. “There’s a dog’s breakfast of systems to rank cities,” observes Gregor Robertson, mayor of Vancouver, which set the goal of being the world’s greenest city. “But there’s nothing rigorous about it.”

Some cities may be lucky when it comes to certain challenges of the post-carbon, climate-change era we are entering. In 2016 The New York Times identified a set of North American cities that would be good bets for escaping the harshest effects of climate change—because they are favorably positioned by topography or geography. Coastal Portland, Maine, for instance, lies high enough above sea level to avoid inundation and far enough to the north to avoid systemic drought. Detroit, Chicago, and Madison, Wisconsin, all in the Great Lakes region, will have to cope with weather that is somewhat warmer and wetter, but not nearly as altered and challenging as cities further to the south, and they have access to plenty of fresh water.

But luck will not be enough for achieving urban success in the face of climate change. Success depends on decisions a city is making now and in the next few years. That’s what city ratings should be telling us about. 

The post The Best City? You Can’t Ignore Climate Anymore appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

For several months John and I have been studying what’s known and done about “managed retreat,” to understand how US cities might be prompted to adopt this ignored strategy for climate adaptation. We’ve developed some initial ideas, a hypothesis, and some framing of the landscape within which decisions about managed retreat are made. And there’s more research and thinking to do. Here’s what we have so far:

The typical dynamics of urban development block most US cities from planning—or even considering—a “managed retreat” strategy to prepare for climate changes that could cause parts of the city to be uninhabitable or unusable in this century. Retreat– removing development and relocating people, businesses, and infrastructure—would produce a great deal of political, financial, and community pain and little tangible gain in the short run. This is true even in cities that have undergone a horrendous climate disaster; their instinct is to rebuild their development/spatial footprint, perhaps protecting it more, but not adjusting its expanse to avoid future risks.

And yet, climate changes are projected to make parts of many cities inhabitable and unusable during this century. Rising sea levels and more frequent and intense rainfall will cause chronic flooding and erosion in coastal and riverside communities. By 2060, more than 270 coastal US communities will be chronically inundated, given moderate sea-level rise, according to a 2017 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists. More rapid sea-level rise could chronically inundate nearly 670 coastal communities by 2100, including 50 heavily populated cities, among them: Oakland, Miami, New York City.[1] Prolonged droughts will cause severe water shortages and waves of extreme heat will make it dangerous to be outside. El Paso, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and other cities in the southwest US are located in arid environments that have natural scarcity of water and precipitation and are becoming hotter and drier, a 2017 Arup report noted, adding that the nation’s arid zone is expanding.[2]

Cities that do anticipate these climate risks usually plan to build their way out of the problem: build more barriers to sea and river surges, more capacity for storm water drainage and water delivery, and more electricity-generation capacity to power more air conditioners to cool buildings. They also plan to move out of climate-harm’s way any underground and street-level infrastructure that could be inundated.

Only a few US cities have included managed retreat in their plans, and some of these are hardly examples of best practice. In April 2018, California’s Coastal Commission forced Del Mar, with about 4,100 residents, to include a retreat strategy in its coastal resilience plan or lose local authority over future development.[3] New Orleans started a retreat strategy (property buy outs) after Hurricane Katrina, but then abandoned it. The US Army Corps of Engineers included retreat—“real estate acquisition and/or relocation”—in its October 2017 flood management recommendations for coastal Norfolk, Virginia, along with many structural defenses, but the overall plan’s $1.8 billion price tag is bigger than the city’s annual budget and depends in large part on receiving a special federal appropriation.[4]

In view of this situation, the Innovation Network for Communities is creating a framework to help answer this question: how can managed retreat become a general planning practice of US cities? The framework redefines managed retreat, describes four pathways that can lead cities to choose to retreat, and identifies the city capacities needed to prepare, implement, and defend decisions about which pathway(s) to managed retreat are being taken. It examines an initial hypothesis: that market dynamics are the most likely force that will lead cities to consider and embrace managed retreat. And it proposes several next steps.

Defining Managed Retreat

Most literature and news reports about managed retreat focus on the elimination of existing physical infrastructure and housing and the subsequent relocation of people due to retreat-inducing threats posed by flooding due to rising seas and rivers. For research purposes, we have framed managed retreat more broadly in two ways. Our definition includes the prevention of future development, not just the dismantling of existing development, because relinquishing development is also a consequential retreat from a city’s future land-use footprint. And we have considered the climate risks that, in addition to chronic flooding, may be posed by extreme heat and drought as another potential driver of city retreat.

“Managed retreat” is the use of public policies, including regulation and investment, to over time eliminate or prevent development from areas that are:

• At significant risk of recurrent or permanent damage or destruction from climate effects
• Needed in an undeveloped, natural condition in order to protect other development that is at significant climate risk (e.g., green space designed to absorb flood waters)

When eliminating development also involves relocation of people and businesses, managed retreat may include resettlement and engagement of “receiving communities” where relocation is to occur.

“Development” means physical uses of land, especially the building of physical infrastructure. These uses generate economic, social, and environmental impacts, as well as various risks from disruption, damage, and destruction that are not just due to climate change (e.g., other natural disasters, accidents, economic cycles, warfare).

“Climate risks” that may trigger managed retreat are new, regularly recurring or prolonged—chronic—climate patterns, such as extreme high tides and sustained extreme heat waves or increased aridity, which can overwhelm a city’s resilience and damage or destroy physical, social, economic, and environmental assets.

Essentially, managed retreat changes the use of and development of land and/or water in anticipation of climate hazards the city cannot sufficiently manage or afford through other means or chooses not to pay for. It involves an engineering, financial, social, and political calculation.

Managed retreat is one of four approaches to climate adaptation focused on preparation and prevention, rather than post-disaster emergency response and rebuilding. Cities may plan and use these approaches in various combinations.

Retreat may occur at multiple scales, including:

• Individual properties/parcels, sites
• Public infrastructure (roads, wastewater treatment plants, etc.)
• Sub-districts/neighborhoods of cities
• Entire cities
• Urban metropolitan regions
• Regions of a country (rural and urban areas)

Managed retreat should be differentiated from climate migration, which involves the (largely) unplanned and unrequired movement of individuals and businesses away from areas that are under extreme climatic stress or perceived to be at high risk and to areas of greater safety and viability.

US cities have a critical role to play in determining whether and how to use managed retreat as a part of their climate adaptation plans, because they have substantial control over local land uses and, therefore, over development, and they are the primary locus of retreat’s benefits, burdens, and challenges. However, cities operate in policy contexts set by state and federal governments and in the US legal context, which substantially affect the use of managed retreat.

Although managed retreat may be triggered proactively by analysis that anticipates a city’s climate risks, in most cases to date it has occurred reactively, in the wake of a damaging climatic experience such as a storm surge, which then leads to analysis of future risks and recognition that an unmanageable chronic risk is emerging.

Climate-Risk Drivers that Lead to Consideration of Retreat

In general, it is easier to strengthen a city’s resilience to acute climate shocks and therefore hope to avoid retreat choices, than it is to manage chronic climate shocks. However, acute risks may just be the prelude to chronic risks—what appears to be an episodic and manageable pattern may become an accelerating, intensifying, and unmanageable pattern.

The great majority of serious retreat planning has taken place in response to either riverine flooding or sea-level rise. In delta cities, riverine flooding and sea-level rise may combine to exacerbate risks. Some smaller, low-lying islands are at risk of complete, long-term inundation from sea-level rise. Other types of climate impact that may motivate retreat include:

• Extreme rain events (e.g., “cloudbursts”) pose the risk of chronic flooding of low-lying area infrastructure and buildings.
• Prolonged extreme heat poses the risk of illness and death of vulnerable populations such as children, the elderly, and people with chronic diseases. At certain levels of heat, it can become unsafe for humans to be out of doors or indoors without effective cooling systems.
• Droughts and increased aridity (dry, barren land) pose the risk of insufficient water for household, agricultural, or industrial use, a potential limit to a city’s carrying capacity.

Potential Benefits of Managed Retreat

Cities can achieve several potential benefits through managed retreat:

• Protect the Safety and Health of People. Retreat can prevent future injuries, loss of life, and health problems.
• Maintain the Usefulness of Physical and Business Assets. Retreat can ensure the continuing usefulness of physical assets (rerouting a coastal highway), prevent disruption of business, or protect other development from climate risks (e.g., removing development from a floodplain so that more of the flooding will be soaked up before it reaches parts of the city).
• Avoid Future Financial Costs. Retreat can prevent the need for spending on emergency responses to climate disasters and on recovery/rebuilding after disasters. It can also reduce/eliminate financial costs that would be needed instead to protect and accommodate development against climate risks.
• Prevent and Reduce Inequities. Retreat can ensure that the city addresses and prioritizes, rather than overlooks or discriminates against, the interests of disadvantaged individuals, households, and neighborhoods, which are often the most vulnerable to damage due to climate events.
• Preserve Community Cohesion. Retreat can allow the relocation of a group of people in a place as an intact community, rather than the piecemeal abandonment of at-risk properties that might otherwise occur.

• Enhance Ecosystem Services. Retreat can allow enhancement of the capacity of local ecosystems (e.g., wetlands) to provide environmental benefits in addition to improvement in climate resilience (e.g., habitat restoration).

Retreat Strategies

Cities can use multiple strategies to eliminate or prevent development from areas where chronic, potentially disastrous climate risks rule out other climate-adaptation approaches.

To eliminate existing development:

• Invest in Property Acquisition. Cities can purchase property in at-risk areas from voluntary sellers and then remove development and prevent additional development.
• Mandate Removal of Development. Cities can use legal and regulatory processes to require relocation from at-risk areas—immediately or over the long term—but they must compensate property owners and may need to facilitate resettlement of individuals, communities of people, and businesses.
• Prohibit Protection and Accommodation Actions. Cities can preclude property owners from taking certain protection or accommodation actions (e.g., building sea walls), which over time may result in the owners voluntarily retreating from the property.

To prevent future development:

• Constrain Future Development and Post-Disaster Rebuilding. Cities can place conditions on future development that could preclude development activities, such as by increasing the cost of development beyond what the market is willing and able to pay, or restricting rebuilding after a disaster in at-risk areas.
• Prohibit Future Development. Cities can regulate land use to prevent new or additional development in at-risk areas—in order to preserve environmental services for climate resilience, support agricultural uses of land to secure food supply, or foster increased densification of the already built city.

To both eliminate and prevent development:

• Limit Support and Services for Development. Cities can limit/reduce/eliminate suport for infrastructure and services in high-risk areas, such as availability of roads, water, and electricity. Some limitations may be due to factors cities cannot control, such as lack of water or electricity generation to support certain levels of population and agricultural or industrial activities in cities in arid areas.

[1] The study defined “chronic inundation” as flooding that occurs 26 times per year (on average, once every other week) or more over at least 10 percent of the land in a community. https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2017/07/when-rising-seas-hit-home-full-report.pdf

[2] https://www.arup.com/publications/research/section/cities-alive-cities-in-arid-environments.

[3] http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/communities/north-county/sd-no-managed-retreat-20180417-story.html.

[4] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30102017/norfolk-sea-level-rising-flood-protection-plan-army-corps-engineers-climate-change

The post Can It Happen Here? Managed Retreat for US Cities appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

For the past few months. John and I have been working with partners at Meister Consultants Group and Ramboll to understand the challenges and opportunities facing cities trying to fund their climate adaptation plans. It’s no secret that finding money is proving to be a big barrier to advancing urban adaptation, as we discussed in Essential Capacities for Urban Climate Adaptation. So it’s no surprise that lots of people–cities, NGOs, government policy makers, financial institutions, insurance companies, and others–are trying to do something about it. We’ve identified more than 30 innovations or revisions of current financial practice that are in the works, almost all of them at experimental scale. Now we’re thinking about what these add up to, how they contribute to the development of a system for urban climate finance. Below we provide a summary list of these various projects, divided into 6 categories based on what the goal is, and then some initial thoughts about what it looks like to shape these blooming flowers into a well tended garden. The categories:

A. Generating Public Revenues

B. Managing Financial Risk

C. Balancing Burdens and Benefits

D. Aligning Public Policies

E. Leveraging/Catalyzing Private Capital

F. Revising Government Jurisdictions

Accelerating and expanding the development of an urban climate-financing system could follow several approaches:

• Enhancing City-Level Transaction Capabilities. Cities need the ability to produce high-quality and equitable adaptation plans and projects with comprehensive, hybrid investment strategies backed by the necessary multi-jurisdictional governance arrangements and community support, and a technical capacity to implement transactions through a variety of financial mechanisms. Few cities have these capabilities in place for climate adaptation.
• Aligning Government Policies. Cities need state and federal governments to initiate comprehensive, aligned policies, regulations, and standards that support increases in public revenue and private capital for climate adaptation, and eliminate barriers for cities and distortions in market behaviors. Only a few states are moving in such a direction, as are some federal agencies such as FEMA, but the efforts are not usually aligned with each other or through engagement of cities and market players.
• Scaling Changes in Financial, Insurance, and Real Estate Markets. Cities need key markets to accurately price climate risk and develop and rapidly deploy risk management solutions for private capital, including revised and new products and services, and put in place standards for risk disclosure and resilience financing. “Making these market mechanisms work effectively requires a widely accepted set of standards and disclosures for buildings that signals the degree of resilience to the various actors and helps them assess risks more accurately,” as the Sustainable Solutions Lab of the University of Massachusetts-Boston reported in April 2018.[1]

[1] “Financing Climate Resilience,” 30.

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