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.

Climate Change and the Giant Iceberg Off Greenland’s Shore

By Carolyn Kormann

“For a week, an iceberg as colossal as it is fragile held everyone in suspense. It arrived like a gargantuan beast that you hope won’t notice you, at the fishing village of Innaarsuit, Greenland, about five hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. The iceberg posed a mortal threat to the village population of about a hundred and seventy people. Standing three hundred feet tall (the height of the Statue of Liberty) and weighing an estimated ten million metric tons (equal to thirty Empire State buildings), it’s riven with cracks and holes. If a big enough part of it sloughed off, in a process known as “calving,” it would cause a tsunami, immediately destroying the little settlement on whose shore it rested. “You don’t want to be anywhere near the water when it’s happening,” a glaciologist who does research in Greenland said. “It’s just incredibly violent.” People began to evacuate.”

Rest of New Yorker article 

The post Which Future Are We Choosing? appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

Here’s how that retreat vs. rebuild tension played out in Louisiana and New Orleans after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, according to J. Peter Byrne and Jessica Grannis in a chapter in The Law of Adaptation to Climate Change:

“Owners of damaged properties were eligible to receive $150,000 in assistance but were given the option to rebuild or repair their homes in place or be bought out. Of 128,000 property owners who received assistance, only 10 percent opted to sell. The program did not effectively implement retreat, especially in New Orleans. this was because homeowners opting to be bought out were typically undercompensated and buyouts were not targeted based on a property’s vulnerability to future flooding. Because damage to the city’s housing stock was so widespread, it was also difficult for property owners to find affordable places to relocate. Finally, because the program was voluntary and governments could not resell properties with low vulnerability, the buyout program created a checkerboard of vacant lands interspersed with redeveloped properties. . . . In New Orleans, the public was not adequately involved in early phases of redevelopment planning. one major point of contention was the release of a redevelopment plan for the city that showed some developed areas as future open space. This caused significant political backlash, and, as a result, the mayor backpedaled on implementing a retreat strategy and announced that the city would rebuilt to the pre-Katrina footprint.”

The authors conclude that since retreat after a disaster is hard to pull off, “retreat policies may be easier to implement when they are instituted as part of a pre-emergency plan that is created with significant public involvement.” Maybe, maybe not. We are conducting research to identify the “pathways” that cities follow, or reject, when they do consider managed retreat as a part of a climate adaptation strategy before disaster has already hit. If you read the scores of city adaptation plans that exist, managed retreat is almost never a part of the discussion, much less the decision. Maybe that’s because the anticipated climate risks don’t warrant going through the pain of retreat, but maybe the omission is due to other reasons.

If your city has considered managed retreat as part of its adaptation approach, we’d like to know about it and learn more about what did or didn’t happen as a result. Please contact me at pete@in4c.net.

Watch “How a Community Was Sacrificed” about the Houston-area development that was flooded–according to a 70 year old plan–to protect the downtown.

The post Wanted: Cities Considering “Retreat” in Anticipation of Devastating Climate Risks appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

1 SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATION – Capacity to assess and understand climate risks and vulnerabilities of city’s built, natural, and economic assets and its populations, and use these analyses for ongoing adaptation planning.

2 COMMUNICATIONS – Capacity to communicate with and educate civic leaders and community members in ways that build and sustain a sense of urgency to adapt for climate changes.

3 EQUITABLE ADAPTATION – Capacity to make social and economic equity a central driver of the city’s adaptation approach.

4 INCLUSIVE COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT – Capacity to fully engage stakeholders and the public, especially vulnerable and underrepresented populations, in developing, implementing, and monitoring adaptation plans

5 INTERGOVERNMENTAL ALIGNMENT – Capacity to coordinate planning and action across governments at local, regional, state, tribal, and federal levels.

6 TECHNICAL DESIGN – Capacity to design, test, and implement adaptation actions that require engineering, legal, and other highly specialized details, as well as performance metrics for monitoring

7 FINANCIAL RESOURCES – Capacity to repurpose, leverage, and obtain public and private funds to invest in infrastructure development and other adaptation actions.

This work was supported by the Summit Foundation and the willingness of 35 city practitioners, climate-adaptation experts,city-supporting and conservation NGOs, and funders of urban adaptation work to share their knowledge with us. See report

The post Essential Capacities for Urban Climate Adaptation appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

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 natural disasters or anticipating and planning for climate change in their future—and having to decide where and what to permit and build under what conditions. Even inaction 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 consider when deciding what they want to do about using managed retreat as a city strategy for addressing climate change risks. We will also 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/relocate development and/or demolish/withdraw support for infrastructure 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. For instance, we have been developing a collaboration with the Georgetown Climate Center, which is launching a two-year project to produce a best-practices toolkit for state and local governments about managed retreat. As we conduct the project we expect to engage with other organizations, such as the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, C40, 100 Resilient Cities, the American Planning Association, and the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, which may contribute to our thinking and find the report’s framing useful for their own work. 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.

The post Pathways for Managed Retreat – INC Project Description appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

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.

The post Pathways for Managed Retreat – A New INC Project appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.