Adapting North Carolina's Coastlines to a New Era of Sea Level Rise
Creators: name: Feld, Eric Ross
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2010

description: Over the course of the next century, North Carolina's coastal communities will need to make difficult decisions about how they manage their land uses in response to projections of rising sea levels. As a consequence of sea level rise, researchers anticipate that the state's coastal municipalities will experience a multitude of physical changes, the most notable being the inundation of low-lying lands. Although 1 in 10 North Carolinians lives in an area where the state's Coastal Area Management Act (CAMA) oversees local land use planning, the certified CAMA land use plans include only a paucity of specific sea level rise adaptation provisions. Without proactive adoption of adaptation strategies at the local level, sea level rise has the potential to profoundly impact the quality of life for many of North Carolina's coastal residents. Because land use policy decisions originate at the local level, land use planning will be the appropriate tool for responding to sea level rise. As such, North Carolina's coastal counties are currently at a critical juncture. As complex scientific uncertainty pervades attempts to accurately predict the extent of sea level rise and its associated impacts, many coastal residents and policymakers have understandably questioned the value of planning for sea level rise as the costs of change are steep. Should extra public funds be used to elevate bridges in anticipation of a high measure of sea level rise that may never occur? Is it worth the financial cost for a community to avoid an illegal takings challenge by purchasing land situated at 0.5 meters in elevation when sea level rise may only reach a maximum of 0.4 meters? On the other hand, enough evidence exists to correlate accelerations in sea level rise with increases in global industrial activities (IPCC, 2007). Should Morehead City expensively improve its wastewater network in an area of low elevation just to eventually relocate it when later evidence of inundation becomes more apparent? Will Elizabeth City be able to afford moving a school if it is sited on land that will soon be too unstable to support such a structure? The connections between sea level rise adaptation and land use planning have been discussed by state officials as recently as March of 2010 when the Coastal Resources Commission's Science Panel on Coastal Hazards recommended that one meter be adopted as the amount of anticipated sea level rise by 2100 for the purposes of policy development and planning (Division of Coastal Management, 2010). The objective of this report is to supply an in depth analysis of the need for incorporating sea level rise adaptation into local CAMA planning efforts based on the specific effects of sea level rise that North Carolinians are expected to experience over the next century. Moreover, this project is driven by the desire to serve the public interest by raising awareness of the vital role of planning in helping North Carolina's coastal communities to avoid experiencing calamitous outcomes associated with sea level rise.