Starting the Conversation on Retreat

Wetlands Watch’s Policy Director, Mary Carson Stiff, holding a conversation on property buyouts.

SNAPSHOT: There is an emerging conversation about moving people out of the way of rising coastal waters. Some call it “retreat,” some call it “strategic coastal relocation,” some call it “shoreline reinvestment.” Whatever you call it, the process is going to be expensive and very controversial and we need to start working at the neighborhood level to understand what is going on. And our experience is that we need to approach the subject very carefully and compassionately.

BACKSTORY: After over a decade of work, we are entering the period where we have to start having difficult conversations about what we do with residences and businesses for which there are no sea level rise solutions other than retreat. We have reached consensus on the rates of sea level rise in Virginia, allowing us to go to public maps and viewers and see what the impacts will be. Now anyone can identify individual parcels that in the foreseeable future will be under water or inaccessible.

Wetlands Watch has been working on how to get folks out of the way. We started years ago with work that evolved into the new statewide Community Flood Preparedness Fund, a multi-million dollar pot of money that can be used for property buyouts. We are now developing a program to use land trusts to get people off their increasingly at-risk property.

But this didn’t just happen - we’ve been at this for over a decade.

2008 - Wetlands Watch began its work on sea level rise/flooding/resilience over 12 years ago, seeking a way to keep Virginia’s tidal wetlands working. We started with a letter to then-governor Kaine, projecting Virginia would lose between 50 and 80 percent of its tidal wetlands if we did nothing to adapt.

We then began an effort to help coastal communities adapt to sea level rise and climate change, working mostly with local governments as they made land use decisions along the shoreline. Over time the conversation shifted from confrontation - many people were still denying that there was a problem - to collaboration, as the changes were accepted more broadly and we shifted to finding solutions to address the flooding.

We developed a number of tools and resources for Virginia’s shoreline residents. We saw lots of sea level rise adaptation guides developed, but none that were specific to Virginia’s unique political and legal situation. With funding from an anonymous donor, we assembled a Virginia Guide to Adaptation, interviewing over 70 local government staff and devoting many weeks of research to pull together an adaptation manual with Virginia-specific referenced.

We did studies on funding to fix the problems and found there wasn’t enough money to meet our needs. We worked with Sen. Lynwood Lewis to create a state revolving loan fund for flooding. The loan fund was changed to the “Community Flood Preparedness Fund,” and raised over $102 million in its first year! Some of that Fund can go to buyouts, but there is still not enough funding to meet the need.

We started looking at other finance schemes and developed a program to put land trusts to work helping move people off of increasingly wet properties. We are now moving ahead with these ideas and these conversations but it will be hard work.