They’ve opted instead to fund resilience measures like elevating homes and roads. While Newport News officials have had some success in persuading people to accept buyouts, nearby municipalities like Norfolk and Virginia Beach have been slower to adopt managed-retreat strategies. If the owners accept the buyout, the city then does its own mitigation projects like turning the vacant lots into parks that can better soak up floodwaters.įunding climate change mitigation projects is costly no matter how a community does it. The city uses FEMA maps to determine the riskiest areas and then offers to buy out the riskiest properties. The city’s annual budget allocates about $200,000 to buy out properties that repeatedly flood. Newport News, Virginia, which sits on the James River north of Naval Station Norfolk, leads the state with the highest number of buyouts at 80. (The state has until the end of 2023 to formally leave the pact.) Glenn Youngkin recently announced plans to withdraw from the cap-and-trade agreement. Auctioning off of carbon credits created through Virginia’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative was intended to provide partial funding for these efforts. The state intends to work with communities to “plan, implement, and support successful and lasting adaptation and protection strategies,” while also instituting buyout programs for the most flood-prone areas. Virginia state officials have indicated that relocating people away from those areas is one option in the state’s 2021 Coastal Resilience Master Plan. The most common type of managed retreat is a buyout program funded by either the local, state, or federal government. Managed retreat is the purposeful movement of people and infrastructure away from risky areas prone to repeating natural disasters. Sometimes, however, mitigation is not enough, and communities must consider how to accurately communicate to residents that certain areas are just plain risky areas to live and that they’ll have to plan for the previously unthinkable: moving out of harm’s way. The region’s municipal officials have been well aware of this problem and have gone to great lengths to come up with fortification strategies, building seawalls, retrofitting old buildings with climate-resistant infrastructure, and elevating roads. Local maps are now seriously out of date, especially when it comes to charting and preparing local communities for rising waters. This rate of sea level rise is faster than local planners had previously anticipated. Hampton Roads is sinking at a relatively high rate, with the Navy’s assets in some of the most at-risk places. According to a new Virginia Tech Earth Observation and Innovation Lab study, sections of land along the Chesapeake Bay shoreline are sinking at rates of nearly a quarter of an inch a year. Norfolk has the highest rate of sea level rise on the East Coast, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts the sea level will rise between one and three feet in the region by 2050. The bowl-like shape of the Chesapeake Bay, and the way the James and Elizabeth Rivers flow into that depression, means that the region has the dubious distinction of dealing with both rising seas and sinking land. Climate change is bearing down on Hampton Roads. Yet for an area inextricably linked to water, the water is now a serious problem. Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval facility, hosts more than 330,000 active-duty personnel, military retirees, families, civilian employees, and others and spends billions in the state. Managed retreat, unlike funding seawalls and elevating roads, is likely cheaper in the long run since seawalls and roads are constantly getting damaged by rising seas.įor the nearly two million people in Norfolk, Newport News, Virginia Beach, and the surrounding communities that make up the Hampton Roads region of southeastern Virginia, the Atlantic Ocean is not only the cultural lifeblood of the area, it is an economic driver.
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