Sobering Information on Virginia's Coastal Challenge: 14 Years Later and Not Much Progress

In 2007, Wetlands Watch began its work on sea level rise with a letter to then-Governor Kaine, warning him that with the projected rates of sea level rise (then estimated to be “only” 2 feet/century), Virginia would lose, “between 50 and 80 percent of its vegetated tidal wetlands,” by the end of this century.

Fast forward to today - in the recently completed Virginia Coastal Resilience Master Plan, after 14 years of work, the wetlands loss estimate is up to 89% by 2080! Current estimates of Virginia’s sea level rise by 2100 are at least 4.5 feet. New estimates of a beach and dune loss of 38% add to our coastal woes. Habitat loss of this magnitude will doom birds, fish, and shellfish as the coastal ecosystem drowns.

Two years of work went into this first phase of a Master Plan.

Sea level rise on the scale we are seeing has happened many times in the past but without human civilization along the shore, the wetlands and dunes simply rolled “uphill” when they could, moving into the new intertidal zones. New habitat was created landward of the existing coastline.

Today we have to contend with the conflict of protecting the habitat and protecting shoreline communities that now block the migration path for wetlands and dunes. But the sobering reality revealed by the Master Plan is that many of those communities will not survive, given our projected rates of sea level rise. This is what is prompting Wetlands Watch to turn its focus toward retreat: finding ways of accelerating the strategic process of moving people our of harm’s way (and also allowing the coastal ecosystem to move with the tide).

Next steps involve an immediate update of the Master Plan to include new rainfall estimates and make the plan cover the entire state and include the Shenandoah Valley and Southside Virginia where rainfall flooding is causing extreme problems.

We also need to start work on the problems and solutions identified in this study, using the new Community Flood Preparedness Fund and other sources of revenue.

We need to view our wetlands, dunes, and shorelines as critical infrastructure, deserving protection in its own right. We need a natural infrastructure plan in Virginia.

Finally, we need to start that tough talk about retreat along Virginia’s coastal shoreline.

We have to do better in the next 14 years than we have in the last 14 years.