An Excellent Review of Adaptation...and Retreat...Along the Shoreline

Llewellyn Ave. in Norfolk - October, 2015

We wander along the shoreline trying to make sense of the flooding we are seeing and what we should be doing about it. An excellent Washington Post Magazine article tells the story in ways that people can understand.

At first, our work at Wetlands Watch was mostly focused on making room for the marshes, shoreline buffers, and the rest to move uphill with rising tides. This meant keeping people from developing the shoreline and trying to find ways for folks to move away from development that was already there.

The task on the first part - stopping development - is getting easier as folks clearly see the folly of building in areas that will flood. The recent decision in the City of Virginia Beach to deny a subdivision rezoning request shows that.

Moving people away from the shoreline is much more difficult, as this article shows. Our work on using a land trust to speed retreat is one experiment we are running now. The Norfolk zoning ordinance rewrite is an example of a city trying to get people to move uphill over time.

However, as this article points out, that is going to be very hard work and the big unknown is whether we can get the job done in time.