Coasts

The 2012-15 West Vancouver Shoreline Protection Plan is complemented by an action plan outlining upcoming work in West Vancouver. With contributions from West Vancouver citizens and groups such as the West Vancouver Shoreline Preservation Society and the West Vancouver Streamkeepers, the District now has a framework and road map to pro-actively work on protecting the waterfront.

Las dunas costeras son ecosistemas terrestres únicos situados en la transición entre ambientes continentales y marinos. Como el resto de hábitats costeros, los sistemas dunares son extremadamente frágiles, ajustados en su formación, desarrollo y evolución a procesos naturales, y fácilmente vulnerables frente a la acción humana. Se distribuyen a nivel mundial en todo tipo de climas y en España presentan una amplia distribución tanto en la península como en las islas.

El objetivo de este Manual es dotar de la información que permita proponer las medidas técnicas necesarias para conseguir una restauración ecológica de las dunas costeras, mediante un proceso que facilite la recuperación del ecosistema degradado, dañado o destruido, cuya meta sea recuperar sus valores intrínsecos, elementos bióticos, abióticos y su funcionamiento y dinámica, en su contexto histórico y regional, y que permita la realización de prácticas culturales sostenibles (SER 2002). El Manual va dirigido, por tanto, a los técnicos y gestores que dedican su actividad a la gestión y restauración de los sistemas dunares.

The Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions collaborated with the Natural Capital Project and Stanford Law School to foster a transition from adaptation planning to implementation. Our team engaged planners, managers and others at the city, county and state levels to identify policy and decision-making gaps in the coastal adaptation context. We specifically targeted local communities currently updating their planning documents, such as Local Coastal Programs. This evolved into an investigation of a wide range of legal, nancial and engineered strategies, including legal considerations, potential tradeoffs, and key examples of these strategies when possible.

This compilation of coastal adaptation policy briefs on topics we co-identified with local communities throughout California reflects our research on these topics. Our work aims to provide clarity and information regarding the implementation of particularly salient adaptation strategies and topics. While these compiled resources were developed with a particular focus on local decisionmaking in California, the information can inform similar adaptation work elsewhere.

California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment (Fourth Assessment) advances actionable science that serves the growing needs of state and local-level decision-makers from a variety of sectors. This cutting-edge research initiative is comprised of a wide-ranging body of technical reports, including rigorous, comprehensive climate change scenarios at a scale suitable for illuminating regional vulnerabilities and localized adaptation strategies in California; datasets and tools that improve integration of observed and projected knowledge about climate change into decisionmaking; and recommendations and information to directly inform vulnerability assessments and adaptation strategies for California’s energy sector, water resources and management, oceans and coasts, forests, wildfires, agriculture, biodiversity and habitat, and public health. In addition, these technical reports have been distilled into summary reports and a brochure, allowing the public and decision-makers to easily access relevant findings from the Fourth Assessment.

Along nearly 13,000 miles of coastline of the contiguous United States, hundreds of thousands of buildings lie in the path of rising seas: schools, hospitals, churches, factories, homes, and businesses. As sea levels rise, persistent high-tide flooding of homes, yards, roads, and business districts will begin to render properties effectively unlivable, and neighborhoods—even whole communities— nancially unattractive and potentially unviable.

This webinar originally aired May 8, 2018.

This North American Rapid Vulnerability Assessment Tool helps marine protected area managers evaluate the implications of climate change for the habitats of their sites. The tool was created as part of a project on climate assessment and adaptation by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation.  It is available in English and Spanish and has three parts (a user guide, a set of blank worksheets, and a booklet containing sample completed worksheets), which used together allow marine protected area managers to conduct a rapid vulnerability assessment and adaptation strategy development process. This webinar will cover: 1) why the tool was created, 2) an overview of the tool (how it works, what it looks like, where to find it), 3) the experience of using the tool, and 4) additional application of the tool. Learn more about the tool here.

Presented by Sara Hutto of Greater Farallones Association and Lara Hansen of EcoAdapt.

Webinar co-sponsored by the NOAA National MPA Center, MPA News, and the EBM Tools Network (co-coordinated by OCTO and NatureServe).

Increasing rates of sea level rise caused by global warming are expected to lead to permanent inundation, episodic flooding, beach erosion and saline intrusion in low-lying coastal areas. Sea level rise is a significant and growing threat to the coastal region of New Jersey, USA and this study presents a comprehensive assessment of the expected impacts. We project future sea level rise based on historical measurements and global scenarios, and apply them to digital elevation models to illustrate the extent to which the New Jersey coast is vulnerable. We estimate that 1 to 3 % of New Jersey’s land area will be affected by inundation and 6.5 to over 9 % by episodic coastal flooding over the next century. We also characterize potential impacts on the socioeconomic and natural systems of the New Jersey coast focusing on Cape May Point for illustrative purposes. We then suggest a range of potential adaptation and mitigation opportunities for managing coastal areas in response to sea level rise. Our findings suggest that where possible a gradual withdrawal of development from some areas of the New Jersey coast may be the optimum management strategy for protecting natural ecosystems.

This report has been prepared by EcoAdapt for the MPA Monitoring Enterprise. The MPA Monitoring Enterprise, a program of the California Ocean Science Trust, is tasked with developing and implementing monitoring of California’s emerging statewide MPA network. While climate change is not explicitly incorporated into the goals and objectives of California’s MPAs, future evaluations of MPA performance will occur in the context of a changing climate and associated changing oceanographic environment. Moreover, MPA monitoring in California provides a framework that can be applied to inform the climate change management dialogue. A statewide network of MPAs, in which other anthropogenic stressors are reduced, provides a large-scale, natural laboratory to understand how climate changes manifest in ocean ecosystems. Thus, this presents a timely opportunity to develop and recommend an approach to most efficiently and effectively augment MPA monitoring to provide additional information. This information should aid in the interpretation of MPA monitoring results but also can be designed to inform the management dialogue around potential climate change effects on marine ecosystems and adaptation or mitigation measures.

Coastal land loss is an inevitable consequence of the confluence of three primary factors: population growth, vanishing wetlands, and rising sea levels. Society may either mitigate coastal land loss by engaging in human engineering projects that create technological solutions or restore natural processes that protect the coastal zone, or it may choose to adapt to coastal land loss by shifting development and other human and economic resources out of areas especially at risk for coastal land loss. This Article first details the primary threats to coastal lands. Next, the Article discusses two primary means of addressing coastal land loss— mitigation and adaptation—applying those terms slightly differently than they are used in the broader climate change context in order to focus more precisely on the coastal land loss phenomena and its solutions. Finally, the Article makes three normative claims for why policy-makers should approach coastal land loss mitigation in particular with caution: (1) uncertainty of mitigation’s effectiveness scientifically and institutionally; (2) the political expediency of choosing mitigation over adaptation; and (3) the fact that failure to adapt past land-use activities in the coastal zone has contributed to the need to adapt or mitigate today.