Science Friday - Degrees Of Change: Sea Level Rise, Coal-Use Decline. May 17, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: May 17, 2019

As the frequency of tropical storms and droughts increase and sea levels rise with climate change, forested wetlands along the Atlantic coast are slowly filling with dead and dying trees. The accelerating spread of these “ghost forests” over the past decade has ecologists alarmed and eager to understand how they are formed and what effect they will have regionally and globally.  One interdisciplinary group of researchers from North Carolina State University and Duke University are examining the causes and effects of repeated saltwater exposure to the coastal wetlands of North Carolina. Using soil and sediment sampling, remote hydrological monitoring, vegetation plotting, as well as spatial maps, the research team is determining the tipping point for when a struggling forest will become a ghost forest. According to ecologist Emily Bernhardt, their preliminary findings suggest that climate change is not the only culprit in the region. Agricultural irrigation and wastewater ditches that criss-cross much of the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula facilitate the flow of saltwater intrusion deep into the landscape, wreaking ecological and economic havoc. Working with Brian Boutin, director of the Nature Conservancy’s Albemarle-Pamlico Program, Dr. Bernhardt and colleagues hope to provide valuable scientific insights to local farmers, wetlands managers, and regional decision-makers to plan for the further intrusions and hopefully mitigate the effects. Meanwhile, less than 100 miles up the coast from the Albemarle-Pamlico peninsula, the cities of Hampton Roads, Virginia along the Chesapeake Bay are facing some of the worst flooding due to sea level rise in the country. In Norfolk, home of the United States Navy, tides have increased as much as eight inches since the 1970s, and roads that lead from the community directly to naval installations are particularly vulnerable to flooding. But in the last 10 years, Hampton Roads has begun to adapt. “When we first started having these discussions, there was a lot of concern about, should we be having discussions like this in public. What would be the potential impacts on economic development or on the population growth here?” said Ben McFarlane, senior regional planner with the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission. “Now it’s recognized and people know it’s happening. I think the strategy has changed to being more of a ‘Let’s stop talking about how bad it is and how bad it’s going to get. And let’s start talking about solutions.’” The Planning District Commission supports the use of living shorelines and ordinance changes that discourage developing in flood prone areas. Norfolk has even been named one of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities in part for its efforts promoting coastal resiliency in the face of sea level rise. Plus, the latest investment report from the International Energy Agency was released this week, and shows that in 2018, final investment decisions were made to support bringing an additional 22GW of coal-fired electric generation online—but in the same year, around 30 GW of coal-burning generating capacity were closed. Of course, coal plants are still under construction, and there are thousands of terawatts of coal-generating capacity worldwide, so the end of coal is nowhere in sight yet—but the investment report may indicate a tipping point in the global energy budget. Kendra Pierre-Louis, a reporter on the climate desk at the New York Times, joins Ira to talk about that and other climate news—including the President’s energy policy remarks at a natural gas plant, the discovery of another ocean garbage patch of plastic, and the rise of “climate refuge cities.” Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. The climate is changing, and because we need to deal with it now, this week we open the second chapter of our series, Degrees of Change. In the months ahead, we will explore the challenges of a changing climate and how we as a planet and a people are adapting. This week, what coastal communities are doing in response to sea level rise. We'll bring you two stories, one from North Carolina, the other from Virginia, where we're, Farmers, ecologists, beachgoers, and the military have reached a moment of reckoning with the salty sea. If you can't hold back the rising tide, how do you accommodate it? And we're looking to you to help direct our coverage.

We asked you last month to tell us what your community is doing to tackle climate change head on or to adapt. And you shared your stories with us. Hey, Science Friday. My name is Sarah Lapuma, and I live in Staten Island, New York. This is David Hill with Buffalo Bend Bar in Cibolo, Texas. This is Andrew Stone in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I'm Bill Duff, and I live in a place called Sleepy Hollow in Marin County, California. I'm a member of a community group that was formed to demand the preservation of the granite fell wetland and forest in northwestern Staten Island.

The city of Albuquerque, which received some of the best solar in the United States, has committed to going 100% renewable by 2022. We're a small bar between San Antonio and Austin, and probably the only established, around here with solar panels promoted as getting off the government grid. Sleepy hollows along narrow valley, lots of dry grass and trees. Our homeowners association developed a wildfire hazard protection plan for the entire valley. Protecting this wetland is our local response to climate change. Wetlands hold in floodwaters, and that's why the neighborhoods next to this wetland weren't

flooded during Hurricane Sandy. We have launched a property-assessed clean energy program to make our buildings energy-efficient and solar-powered. and our community banks are lending to homeowners to put on rooftop solar. And as I record this, I can see a herd of goats on the hillside across the valley, eating the grass, and creating a firebreak. From inventory targets that cut our deliveries in half to 95% recycling, we're no longer just the friendliest little honky-tong in Cibolo, Texas.

We're also the eco-friendliest. We're educating the community about the benefits of this invaluable resource by hosting events about emergency preparedness and promoting its public. preservation to policymakers, local businesses, environmental organizations, and our neighbors. So that's how my community is responding to climate change. Some of the stories that you shared with us in responding to climate change, and we'd like you to add your voice if you are not some of those people you heard. Please, tell us how you are responding to climate change.

In what way is your community resilient? Become part of the story. Visit us at ScienceFriety.com slash degrees of change, and let us know. Science Friday.com slash degrees of change. First up this week, check-in on the gatekeepers, the decision-makers, the controllers of the purse strings. Here to help me navigate climate policy news is Kendra Pierre Lewis, a reporter on the climate desk at the New York Times. She's here in our New York studios. Welcome. Good to see you.

Good to see you. Thanks for having me, Ira. First off, there's news this week about the number of coal plants in operation. Right. Yeah, so there's this intergovernmental organization called the International Energy Agency, and they formed in the wake of the oil crisis of the 1970s, and they issue all of these, like, statistics on energy. And they had a new report out this week, and it basically said that the number of investment in new coal-powered plants, it said two things, actually. First, investments in coal plants is up 2% in 2018.

The first increase since 2012. But almost all of that investment was in sustaining production levels, rather than in creation. creating new mines. And the other thing that it said that has attracted quite a bit of attention is that the final investment decisions for new coal power plants has declined. Basically, there are fewer new coal power plants that were put out of production than new coal-fired plants were financed, essentially. In the world.

In the world. Worldwide. Yeah, worldwide. So more were put out of production, the new ones came online. Yeah. Signaling a ship. Right. And it's, or hopefully signaling a shift.

Investments in energy have been down kind of overall, so it could be like a temporary hiccup, but it's in general a really good signal because coal is one of the dirtiest fossil fuels, and we really need to get rid of it if we actually hope to stop climate, or mitigate climate change. It is for every unit of natural gas that you burn, you get twice as much energy as an equivalent amount of coal being burned, and so coal is just very, very dirty overall, and so it's really important from climate change perspective and from an air pollution perspective to reduce the amount of coal that we're burning for electricity.

So it's a positive signal. Of course, one of the biggest fans of fossil fuels is President Trump, and you have a story this week about a talk he gave at a natural gas plant. Yeah, he gave it at a liquefied natural gas facility. So it's a place where they sort of export and liquid, liquefied natural gas around the world. And most of us think of natural gas as well, a gas. If you have a gas stove, you think of it as what you cook with.

But liquefied natural gas is turned into a liquidation. form and you can use it to power cars. You can use it, well, mostly trucks, ships, and buses are sometimes powered by loquified natural gas. And he went on, he talked about his successes in refocusing the Environmental Protection Agency and killing an Obama-era plan that sought to incentivize utilities to cut emissions and switch from coal to natural gas by proposing far less strict regulations. He also tweeted like pipeline successes and drilling in the reopening or opening up.

the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a federally protective refuge of 1.6 million acres of beautiful coastal plain to oil and gas drilling. Yeah. So let's talk intangible things. How much of a tangible impact has any of this had? Yes. Some of the regulations get tied up in courts. Some of them, you know, they don't have a whole lot of impact. Most of them are still in process.

In process. A lot of them have been tied up in court. in the case of it isn't just the Arctic National Refuge that he's opened up for drilling. He's opened up a lot of the Arctic for drilling. But in March, a judge actually rescinded his executive order and said that the Arctic is not open for drilling and put back Obama error regulations. They were supposed to do seismic testing in Annwar this year, but they delayed it until December. And they're opening it up for leasing. They say they want to open up for leasing, but that would mean that these oil companies are buying these leases without actually knowing how.

much oil is there. And there's some estimates that there's actually far less oil in Anwar than previously thought. Right. All right. Let's move on to a really interesting story that is peripherally connected because you need fossil fuels to make plastics. Right. And you have a story about a newly discovered ocean garbage patch. When I saw this, the pictures I couldn't believe. Yeah. So it's on the Coco's Keeling Islands. They're about 1,300 miles away from Australia. They're sort of, by our standards in the middle of nowhere. And a researcher by the name of Jennifer Lavers out of the University of Tasmania, she discovered it and she quantified it.

I think she found as much plastic on it as a blue whale ways, which is a lot when you consider how light plastics actually are. She is this really elegant, if disturbing statistic that there's more plastic in the ocean than stars in the Milky Way. Wow. And the reason that she, so this is actually the second trash island that she's found. She found another one, Henderson Island about four or five years ago, and she's actually been looking at plastic.

marine pollution for about 15 years. And for the first 10 of those years, people told you to go find a real problem. So the Henderson Island research that she was doing, she actually got sent to Henderson Island to study rats, not to study plastic. But when she got there, she was like, there was so much plastic here. So she did all of that research at nights and weekends on a spare time. And she issued this huge report, and there was a little bit of attention on the original trash island, Henderson Island. And then it sort of fizzled. And so the thing about Cocoa Keeling Islands, or the Coco's Keeling Islands, is that they're also a tourist. destination, so they're very not populated. They're about 550 people on two of the 27 islands there, so almost nobody lives there. But there is this tremendous amount of plastic pollution, and what's clear is it's not coming from there. 550 people can't generate that much plastic. It's coming from us. And so she's hoping that the idea of destroying paradise, like this beautiful vacation destination

for so many people, will really hit home to the idea of plastic pollution. Right. Finally, we're going to be talking about. what individual cities are doing this hour, but you have a story about climate refuge cities. Places that want you to come to? Places that are at least tangentially or potentially better suited under a warming world

than other places to live. So it's not places where climate change won't happen. But Jesse Keenan, a researcher out of Harvard, has identified two cities, Buffalo, New York, and Duluth, Minnesota, as places that, say, you live in Miami. You might want to choose to live to instead. He jokes that Duluth does. has have a surfing season, unfortunately, it's in winter, to get that wets seat ready.

And again, it's not that, you know, Duluth has issues with flooding and has had a few severe storms. It's just that overall, the negative impacts that they're expected to see in a warming world are more manageable than, say, encroaching seas if you live in Miami. Yeah, you'll be underwater in the south there. You know, but what's interesting is we've had some tweets from people today, because we're doing this. Some people who live on some of the Great Lakes saying they have seen lake. levels rise like they have never seen in their lifetime? There's more extreme rainfall in that part of the world, so there's more rain falling, which is, again, a risk.

But it's, so no, not no risk. Right. More manageable risks. So there are things that the community can do to help manage and mitigate some of those risks that are more manageable than, say, trying to figure out how do you deal with a hurricane hitting you every three years. Right. I understand that.

And having lived in Buffalo, my alma mater, I understand how, you know, living on the lake is. and sometimes rents and property values are cheaper now, now may be the right time to get in on this. I did. I'm going to admit that after I heard about Buffalo, I looked, and you can buy a house in Buffalo for like 80 grand, which was very tempting to set up the New York Times Buffalo office. When I lived there, it was a 10th, so that was a long time ago.

But these are really, are they going out and actively attracting, putting ads in papers? So Duluth has held a conference, and the mayor is actually in a decision. discussions thinking about it. I've heard Ann Arbor, Michigan is sort of another good place that's doing some real critical thinking about it. The mayor of Buffalo is on record as calling it a climate refuge city, and the city did accept about 10,000 people after Hurricane Maria from Puerto Rico. So in the case of Buffalo, they're already arriving. On great museums and orchestra there, too. And apparently great food. We'll talk later. Jepia Lewis reporter on the climate desk at the New York Times. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for having me. We're going to take a break when we come back talking about sea level rise, preparing for sea level rise, what some cities are doing and what you can do. We'll talk about two cities on the coast, the East Coast in particular, some interesting things happening there, some interesting adaptations. We'll talk about it. You can give us a call 844-724-8255 if we want to talk about adapting to climate change and sea level rise. 844724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFRI, S-E-I-F-R-I. We'll be right back after the break.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. 60 years ago, the Albemarle Pamlico Peninsula along the eastern edge of North Carolina was roughly 1,000 square miles of coastal wetland. Then big industrial farms moved in during the 1970s and 80s. Today, the landscape has transformed yet again, as attested by scientists studying the slow death of a seacoast forest.

A ghost forest is a very clever name for a kind of unfortunate new habitat type we're seeing growing on the coast. And it's a place where you have a lot of dead trees, large areas of contiguous forest that are just gone. My emotional response is to mourn the loss of those trees. But scientifically, I say, what was the congenuous forest that are just gone? combination of stresses that cause this particular stand of trees to bite the dust. We've been doing this now for close to a decade, and in that time, we've already been seeing changes. That's from our latest macroscope video, the Seeds of Ghosts Forests, produced by our video

producer Luke Groskin. The Ghost Forests of North Carolina are what happens when saltwater reaches the delicate freshwater wetland ecosystem. And right now, the face of the Alamarral Pamlico Peninsula hangs in the balance. Both the farms and the wetlands, living there for decades, are under attack by saltwater intrusion. And with sea level rise threatening to take over, scientists are having to quickly figure out how this ecosystem can survive a saltier future. Joining me now are two of those scientists. Emily Bernhardt, Professor of Ecology in the Department of Biology at Duke University,

He's also one of the subjects interviewed in our Ghost Forest video. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Bernhardt. Thank you so much for having me, Ira. It's a pleasure to be here. You're welcome. Brian Bootin is the director of the Albumerl Pamlico Sounds Program at the Nature Conservancy in North Carolina. He joins us by Skype from the Outer Banks. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you so much, Ira. I appreciate you having me on. You're quite welcome. Thanks for joining us. Emily, what has been happening in the recent years that is causing the saltwater intrusions to impact the wetlands over there in the sound. Right. So you always have parts of the landscape that are being affected by saltwater simply by, you know, being adjacent to the sea. And of course, sea level rise is changing what part of

the shoreline is exposed to saltwater. But the real threat to the Almaral Pamlico sound system is the extensive construction of a canal network that was built to drain water off the landscape rapidly in order to enable farming of this really flat, wet part of the world. but is now also serving to move marine salts up into the interior of the coastal plain system. Whenever there's winds, basically blowing salts up through the canal systems, or when we have hurricanes that are bringing salts under the landscape. So we have opened up a huge part of the interior of this landscape to connections to the sea through the construction of canals.

So the canals are having just the opposite effect of what they were built for. They were built to take the fresh water out? but now the salt water is coming in. Well, it's the thing about water, right? It goes both ways. And, of course, as the sea gets higher, you lose that gradient that's mostly leading to drainage. We have a video of the ghost forests up on our website

at ScienceFriday.com slash ghost forest, and the images are really haunting. I mean, it looks like a ghost forest, right? It's a really, I mean, it was a, I don't know who chose this term, but it really fits. You see these large, expansions. of basically tree snags, acres and acres of them in some places, and you know that something has really changed.

And I think trying to understand at this point what proportion of the landscape has already undergone this change and what part of our forested wetlands are vulnerable to change in the near future is a really, really important scientific, economic, and question for our future of the coast. Brian, tell us what the saltwater has been doing to the farmland. How has it impacted the farmers? So a lot of the farmers that are beginning to experience saltwater intrusion really began seeing it very apparent about a decade ago or so.

And farmers were seeing that their crops were becoming stunted. There was areas of their fields that they weren't being able to actually cultivate. There was no seed growth or germination at all. So farmers began to try to figure out ways around this. So some of the solutions that they came up with were flooding their fields to really push some of that salt out. And that's becoming a more widespread occurrence, especially along the coastline of the Albemaropamacos Peninsula. And the farmers then can't deny what they see and what's happening, they must believe in sea level rise in climate change. Yeah, I would

say most of the farmers out on the Alamara Peninsula are very aware of their vulnerabilities. And, you know, because of that, they're able to really think about new types of solutions that probably weren't available to them, you know, 50, 60 years ago when they were first constructing the canals out there. Our number 844-8255, if you'd like to talk about this. And the salt water intrusion problem, Emily, how is that related to climate change? Is it purely sea level rise? It's not purely sea level rise.

In fact, if it were only sea level rise, again, you would really see a bit of an increase in the amount of salts mixing up slope just because the sea is higher. But the big issue is other parts of climate change, which are more intense droughts that we've been experiencing the southeast in the last decade in hurricanes. These are events that move salt up onto the landscape. And so the droughts, I think, have been the particular reason why we started to see an extreme increase in salinization associated with two centennial droughts back in 2007 and 2008. And it seems sort of strange, right, but you just don't have fresh waters flowing off of the coast, and that allows the opportunity for marine salts to mix. up into the landscape. And so that's when you really saw a pretty significant encroachment of salt water into the interior.

As you get the salt water encroaching into the interior, is it percolating down into the drinking water, into the, you know, where you might remove the drinking water is becoming brackish? It's certainly going to be an issue. And in fact, one of the things that makes this problem complicated, a lot of the Amar Pamlico-San, where we've been working, the salt water is really a surface water phenomenon. So you have salt water's coming into the surface waters, entering into the soil, some of it probably leaching into groundwater. Other parts of the coast, you're seeing, you know, irrigation or drinking water supply collection out of groundwater, actually leading to saltwater intrusion into the subsurface.

And so you can have both of those things happening in different parts of the coastal plain. And each of them is going to lead to this salinization of the landscape. So, Brian, what are the farmers doing? Are they looking at other crops they might plant that are more salt-tolerant? Are there such things? Yeah, so a lot of the farmers, they originally switched over to growing cotton because cotton has a little bit more tolerance for salt than, say, corn or soybeans. And that cotton has been spread quite a bit across the peninsula,

but folks are beginning to look at other crops that potentially could provide a more salt-tolerant produce for them. Things like asparagus, sugar beets, barley. They all have a much higher salt tolerance, but the markets aren't developed for them in this region yet. What about any discussion of giving up the farmland letting it return to the wetlands? So there are quite a few programs that are available to farmers through the Farm Bill, and specifically the Wetlands Reserve Easement Program has been something that's been utilized pretty extensively across the Albemaropamac Peninsula. And what that does is it actually provides the farmers with an incentive to

put a permanent conservation easement on their property and restore their fields to wetlands. And that has occurred in a number of different places. And you're seeing some folks, particularly those that are experiencing saltwater intrusion, looking at that as a potential solution for them now. Has anybody thought about giving up farming altogether and going to another livelihood? I mean, you're out there in the south where you have a lot of sun exposure, just putting up solar panels. There are.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think you see quite a few big solar farms that are coming online here in the northeast part of the state. I think on the Albemarle-Pemlico Peninsula, they've been mostly focused along the Highway 64 corridor, which really provides a better distribution network for them than areas that are a little bit more remote that are probably experiencing the most saltwater intrusion. So folks aren't quite looking into solar farms as being a, a silver bullet to their issues and, you know, kind of changing over from being a farmer to a solar farmer. Emily, did you want to say something? I thought I might have cut you off.

Oh, no, you didn't. But I was going to say that another issue is that it's not just the salt getting on the farm fields and causing those fields to become less productive. It's also that those salts extract nutrients from the soils and they actually help transport them, make them move into the coastal plains. So one of the issues that we are also concerned about is salinization of the extensive if farmland on the coastal plain may also really exacerbate nutrient pollution issues in the coastal ocean when, you know, another really important livelihood in this part of the world is fisheries.

Hmm. That's an interesting point. You know, under normal circumstances, right, we would restore an ecosystem to what it was once before. But in this case, we sort of have to go back to the future because it's never going to be like it was once before. That's right. And I actually got started working on this issue because I was studying a large farm field. It had a very farmed. 440 hectare farm on the coastal plain that had been turned into a mitigation wetland. And you can see that on the video. It's now the trees three or four times of my height, and it was planted in 2007. Things grew really fast.

But it was basically following what you're required to do for restoration on the coastal plane to get wetland mitigation credits and planted a lot of trees that ultimately aren't particularly salt tolerance. So the lifetime of that restoration under a scenario of sea level rise and saltwater intrusion is a really, it's an interesting problem. probably not the right way forward for our most vulnerable systems. And Brian, what about any engineering solutions to keep the saltwater off the peninsula? So there's a lot of interesting new technologies that are becoming available for farmers.

You know, the traditional tide gates and pumping operations tend to be very expensive for folks. So looking at things like drainage water management, which is actually how to keep some of the fresh water on the landscape to provide. a pressure to keep the salt water from intruding into these areas. Actually, it showed a lot of really good promise of restoring the ecosystem, reducing nutrient runoff, but also producing higher yield for farmers in the long run. Other solutions like cover crops and no-till help to really supplement that multi-benefit that they get from drainage water management practices. Well, what about keeping, you know, putting valves on the canals so that, you know,

the water doesn't come in from the ocean. And you see that a lot down in the Swan Quarter area. So Swan Quarter has actually invested in a large perimeter dike, which is in the southeast part of Hyde County. And that perimeter dike provides about six feet of flood protection for the community. And within those canals, they have installed tide gates in certain places to help mitigate some of the saltwater intrusion. Let's go to the phones.

Let's go to Joshua in Jacksonville, Florida. Hi, Joshua. Hey, how are you doing? Hey, go ahead. I was just wondering if you guys have been considering any permaculture techniques to help alleviate the salt water intrusion. Emily? I think that's probably a question for Brian. Okay, Brian?

I think that's something that we are looking at. We're talking to folks from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, and that is something that they have brought up as a potential area for exploration in this, in this, part of our coast. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So put on your crystal ball hat combination if you can. Emily, what do you see in the future? Is there a worst case scenario, let's say, 50 years from now? I think the worst case scenario is that we basically ignore the problem. We continue to farm salt intolerant crops and use heavy amounts. of fertilizer throughout an enormous part of the vulnerable fields in the coastal plain. And then we have sort of a major drought or a major hurricane season,

basically take those farms back and make them into sort of underwater ocean, coastal ocean. I think that's a really bad scenario in that you've got a major fertilizer pollution problem. You've got farm fields without any sort of salt tolerant plants that are there to help maintain the land surface. A better, more optimistic vision is that we think of, some sort of adaptation schema whereby we move from either farm fields or salt intolerant forested wetlands towards salt marsh systems. I think that would be the ideal case to maximize biodiversity fishery support protection of the interior from storms. Brian, do you agree?

I absolutely agree. I mean, 20% of our corn production in the state comes from these counties on the Albemarle Pamela Peninsula. So it's obviously a really important economic driver for for our state as a whole, being able to adapt these systems and these farming operations to a future of change and being able to live with the water rather than try to actually fight against the coming change is going to be incredibly important to maintain the productivity of these areas and as well as the cultural heritage of our coast. On the other hand, if we hear of sea level rise, if the glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland keep melting at the rate, we're talking by the end of the century.

tree. Ocean rises somewhere between three and 11 feet. Is anything going to keep that back? I will say, I think, if I could just jump in, I mean, I think we're already looking at a foot to three feet based on current projections by 2100, and that does put a large part of this peninsula underwater at mean high tide. And so we know, we kind of know where this place is pretty likely to be going without really massive infrastructure investment, and the question is, how do we do that gracefully. And is that kind of question actively being discussed in the state? I think you may have heard that our state legislature does not allow state government entities currently to actually consider that level of sea level rise. You're not even allowed to use

the word climate change, are you? Well, I am. I mean, it's just an issue for state agencies, but of course the people who were setting this problem recognize that this is an issue. We've got to think about the real numbers. Brian, how do you respond to that? Yeah, well, I think our state is really becoming much more progressive and proactive when it comes to climate adaptation planning and implementation. We have established a new Office of Recovery and Resilience. We have Executive Order 80 from Governor Cooper's administration, which really directs all of our cabinet agencies to look into different resiliency options for our communities. So there's the wheels in motion that are currently getting us to the place that we're.

need to get to effectively plan for and help our communities adapt to the coming change at the local level. I'm glad you brought up resiliency because that's going to be what we're going to be discussing for the rest of the hour with a couple of towns not too far from you, folks. So I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us today. Emily Bernhard, Professor of Ecology in the Department of Biology at Duke University, and Brian Bootin, director of the Albemarle Pamlico Sounds program at the Nature Conservancy in the University. North Carolina. And don't forget to check out our amazing Ghost Forest video. This is really dramatic footage that you'll see at Science Friday.com slash ghost forest. And I know my guests have been very active in being part of that video. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today.

Thank you so much. And as I say, when we come back, what does a coastal city resilient to sea level rise look like? We're moving up the coast to Hampton Roads, Virginia. We'll talk about what they are doing, how they're dealing with a rising ocean level near them. Our number, 844-724-8255. Perhaps you live on a coastal city. You want to talk about it in your town. What are you doing? 844-724-8255.

You can also tweet us at SciFri. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. Less than 100 miles up the coast from the Albaemarle Pamlico Peninsula. the cities of Hampton Roads, Virginia, along the Chesapeake Bay, are facing some of the worst flooding due to sea level rise in the country. In Norfolk, home of the United States Navy, tides have increased as much as eight inches since the 1970s.

And roads that lead from the community directly to the naval installations are especially vulnerable to flooding. But in the last 10 years, Hampton Roads has begun to adapt. My guests are Ben McFarland, senior regional planner with the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission. Derek Loftus, Associate Research Scientist with the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences. Christina Dahl, Senior Climate Scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Welcome all of you to the program. Thanks for having us, Ira. Thanks for having us.

Thank you. Ben, for those who don't know about the geography of Hampton Roads, where are they located? There are five cities, right? making up? We actually have 10 cities in Hampton Roads. We're the whole, the southeastern corner of Virginia, so everything from Williamsburg all the way down to Virginia Beach. And so why are they so

vulnerable to the effect of sea level rise? Well, two reasons. One, we're right on the coast. We have a number of tidal creeks and rivers that weave their way in and out of many of our cities. And then for the eastern half of the region, we're very, very flat and very, very low. And so that combination, the water's here, and it has lots

of places it wants to go. And Derek, explain why nuisance flooding. is such a problem in this area? Well, inevitably, tidal flooding is a particular problem for us in Hampton Roads for the reasons Ben explained. It's very flat, and it's very easy for the compound influences of storm surge and a high tide to further amplify the conditions of a flood event. So just the king tides by themselves are a problem, but then when you compound storm surge

on top of that, it produces a long-lasting disaster that will feel the effects for a very long time. Christy, Norfolk is home of the world's largest naval base, the U.S. Naval Base there. How is this flooding problem impacting military preparedness, according to your research? At the base itself, there have been reports of equipment on the undersides of piers getting inundated with saltwater during high tides once or twice a month. And we also hear reports of seawater bubbling up through storm drains and causing road closures. So that has the potential to affect the ability of troops to get to and from different places on the base. So it's not just a problem of living on the base, but it's a problem of living off the base and getting back and forth to the base when the roads may be flooded. That's right. Military bases don't exist in isolation. They exist within broader communities and are often dependent on the infrastructure within that community for their operations.

Yeah. Ben, you're working on a joint land use study. with the Navy to address some of these concerns. What needs to happen from the community perspective to make the Naval Base more resilient to flooding? So I think it's more than just the community. There really needs to be a conversation between the installations and their host communities. For a long time, the base was focused inward

on what's inside the fence line, and the cities were focused on what was going outside the fence line, but there wasn't a lot of discussion going on between them. And through this study that we're just finishing with Norfolk and Virginia Beach, We've been able to have those conversations, and they've started to identify projects that are located in the community that would have a direct benefit for the Navy's mission readiness. And what kinds of things do you discuss? So, you know, a big part of it is the access issue.

That's the number one concern that the Navy has for its sailors and for the family members and whatnot that need to actually make it to the base. And in many of our communities in Hampton Roads, flooding is becoming more and more frequent. and some of those major roadways that provide direct access to the base are becoming flooded more and more frequently. And so the biggest issue that we've identified is that we need to figure out how we can fix the flooding issue on those major corridors. And that's a combination of things like raising the road in some places, but also installing better and more efficient stormwater management systems to address that flooding, make sure it doesn't happen as frequently. Christy, I know you worked on a report that looked at the vulnerability of military installations all along the coast.

Are there many of them already aware of the risks of sea level rise to their bases? They are. We did a study of 18 installations on the East and Gulf Coast of the U.S., so it wasn't comprehensive, but a decent size set. And in the course of that research, we reached out to planners on each of those bases to hear about what they knew about sea level rise and what their plans were to cope with it in the future. While we weren't able to connect with a representative from every single base, those that we did talk to were very aware of the issue of sea level rise and being very proactive about addressing it.

Because the Pentagon, the Navy in particular, has called climate change and sea level rise a matter of national security, has it not? They have, and in fact the Navy's first report on climate change was almost 30 years ago in 1990. There are people like the Director of Intelligence, Dan Coates, coming out and testifying in front of the Senate that climate change is a national security threat. So the military is paying very close attention to this issue. And Ben, when do people begin to take notice? Hey, you know, it's getting flooding here. For example, I have a tweet from Kendall who says, I frequently visit family in Norfolk. This area is very low-lying, and flooding is increasing throughout my life.

I noticed a particular cross street near my father's house that used to, to only flood during hurricanes and nor'easters, but now it seems to flood any time it rains, more than a short drizzle. So I'm saying to you, when did Hampton Road start to accept the problem of sea level rise and nuisance flooding as something that will be happening more often? Was there some sort of event, a seminal event that happened? So I don't think it was just one event, but in my mind at least, it's been over the last 10 years.

We had, for a long time, Hampton Roads like any other coastal areas, was particularly vulnerable to hurricanes or other major storm events, But we had a short span of time in around 2008, 2009, 2010, where we had some major rainstorm, some nor'easters, or some other kind of lower-profile storm events that really started to drive home to people that we were becoming more and more vulnerable to flooding. And that's only increased since then. The flooding has not gone away. So give me some idea of the specifics, the specific things that they're doing to deal with it. Sure. So we actually have, we're putting together a regional inventory of all the projects that are going on in Hampton Roads across all of our cities.

and counties. Some of the things they're doing are improving their stormwater drainage systems, they're elevating roads, they're putting in place green stormwater management techniques, swales and other sort of things that can kind of treat the water and keep it in place. And they're also elevating homes in some places. That's also a common response in the more vulnerable areas where the flooding has come and it's damaged property. But what about the idea that you need to really plan very far ahead in the future for, let's say, end of the century when sea level ride, though the seas will be anywhere from three to ten feet if the glaciers keep melting the way they are. What do you do for that?

Well, that's a great question. I think, you know, one of the things that our cities are really beginning to focus on around right now are those long-term planning strategies trying to figure out which are the areas they should focus investment in, which are those they should protect, what are the major infrastructure challenges they're going to have to build, how are they going to fund those. And that's something that several of our cities are looking at right now. Virginia Beach has just put out a sea level rise, a comprehensive sea level rise planning strategy document that lays out several different options for the types of major, and we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars of projects, whether it's storm surge barriers or berms or other sorts of

ways to keep the water out. Norfolk has just finished a study with the Corps of Engineers that has identified about a billion and a half dollars in projects that might be built over the next 20 to 30 years. is looking at a comprehensive community-based strategy that's looking at how they can keep the water where it falls as rain, try to keep it there as long as possible and retain it in places so that it doesn't actually compound problems in the pipes that take it to the rivers. Is there any plan at all about way into the future where you might have to do a retreat, a managed retreat from the area? If things get to be too bad.

Well, you know, I think one of the blessings we have here in Hampton Roads is that we're on the water and people like living on the water. But we are also, as has been said, we're home to the largest naval installation in the world. We're home to a vibrant water-based tourism economy. We're home to a vibrant water-based industrial economy. And for a lot of those uses, they have to be on the water. So our plan really is to figure out how we can stay here

and how we can thrive here. There are some specific areas where people might have to retreat from or evacuate from, and there are some discussions going on in terms of how to compensate, people if they were to leave. But the overall strategy is trying to figure out how we can stay. Derek, you've developed something that's really interesting. It helps predict when tides could produce flooding and even models how the water flows between buildings in a downtown area. Tell us

about that. Certainly. So a lot of my research at the College of William and Mary's Virginia Institute of Marine Science really focuses on building hydrodynamic flood forecast models. And as you mentioned, you know, they're very resolute. They incorporate high-resolution LIDAR-derived digital elevation models into them. So in this case, our models only as effective as our representation of reality. So the buildings need to be in there

to account for volume displacement and the friction that they impose due to form drag as water flows around those buildings in a deeper portions of the cities throughout Hampton Roads. And so a lot of my focus is really on validating the accuracy of those models' predictions using remote sensing, sensors, and citizen science.

So you do foresee a time where, like, on the evening weather forecast, besides getting the weather for that day or that coming week, we might get a flood forecast for what points of the city, you know? I mean, at this point right now, folks are already starting to look at these types of models to try and identify whether they should leave their car street part or should they move it into a parking garage from night to night. And it's that granular. You can get down that far. Yeah, so we cover all of coastal Virginia through. the Tide Watch model developed by the Center for Coastal Resources Management at VIMS. And a lot of our research is really focused on trying to provide that level of granularity, so you can make action-based management decisions just for your personal life,

but also for long-term planning. And you have another project that people in Virginia can help out with, right? The King Tide? Yes. Citizens Science Project. Yeah, we're truly thrilled for this opportunity to kind of talk a little bit about some of the work we've done with Catch the King, which is a citizen science-based flood monitoring and mapping effort that started in Hampton Roads.

And simply put, the project just asks volunteers to map flooding in their communities using their smartphone and a free app called Sea Level Rise available for free on iOS and Android platforms. Tell us how that works. Sure. So it's a multi-step process. In this case, as a flood forecast modeler, we provide a forecast map of where the predicted flooding extends for this year's King Tide will be. For this year, for example, October 27th and 2019 is going to be the highest astronomical tide of the year called the King Tide that we're going to ask these volunteers to go out and safely map.

We publish an interactive flood map through our web portal called adaptva.org. In this case, people can access where the flood extents are supposed to be on that map. In this case, we then call for interested citizen scientists that are eager to map flooding near them to help us verify whether or not our flood models predictions were accurate. Ultimately, this kind of effectively engages stakeholders and educational materials related to frequent coastal flood hazard like king tides and nuisance flooding, but also provides kind of a return back to us an active tidal calibration for our very high-resolution street-level hydrodynamic model. The second step involves volunteer registration. In this case, we really value our volunteers' time. And unfortunately, when you ask people to go out and map flooding, everyone's very familiar with maybe the one or two places that they're very familiar about. like the tweet that you mentioned earlier.

In this case, people heuristically know from their personal experiences where flooding happens, and so the first year we did this, many people flocked out to the historic Hague region of Norfolk, where it's flooded many times, and in fact, we've got very old photographs in the hurricane of 1933, where indeed the Hague used to primarily flood

due to these extra-tropical and tropical storm surge events, but now it's flooding on a very frequent basis due to tidal flooding. So we spread people out and dedicate their efforts in separate places throughout Virginia in order to give us a broader perspective of where flooding is happening in places we're less familiar with.

Then the final step is the app. Let me just get in this break. Amira Flato, this is Science Friday, from WNYC Studios. The app, I want to hear about the app, the final step. Certainly, yeah, so Norfolk-based companies, Wetlands Watch and Concurive,

developed this mobile application. It's freely available, and in this case, volunteers use it to take time-stamped and location-logged pictures that kind of gives a picture of exactly where flooding is happening. And volunteers will use them to map public spaces. In this case, they'll also generate flood contours by repeatedly pressing a button to digitally document where the maximum flooding extent is in their communities.

And the last thing I'll mention, I guess, is that we recently won the Guinness World Record for the most contributions to an environmental survey based on our 2017 inaugural King Tide flooding event. And that was because 722 helpful volunteers directly surveyed 59,718 GPS reported high watermarks along the U.S. East Coast over a six-hour period during a King Todd flooding event. I think we can get you a few more volunteers. I'm going to give out the website. If you want to catch the King Tide Citizen Science Project, you want to join that. We have a link for signing up on our website at Science Friday.com slash king tide. that's Science Friday.com slash Kingtide.

It's a citizen science project with an app and everything. And I imagine other cities can take advantage of this as they watch how you're doing with it. Certainly. I mean, there are several individual groups that have been involved,

but inevitably, you know, as this kind of segment's been all about, you know, water knows no political or municipal boundaries. So success in any coastal resiliency effort depends on effective communication, collaboration, execution. So in this effort, you know,

lots of coastal communities can get involved. us Virginia-based. That's great to hear. I want to thank my guests this hour, Ben McFarland, senior regional planner with the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission. Derek Loftus, assistant research scientists with the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences, and Christina Dahl, senior climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. And if you live in Virginia and you want to participate in the Catch the King Tide this year,

I'm going to repeat how to do this because we're going to send you a few. Listeners, Derek, sometimes we break some servers some places. So we'll do that. Look forward to it. Yeah, if you live in Virginia, you want to participate and catch the king tide this year, you can sign up at ScienceFriday.com slash king tide. If you don't live in Virginia, that's okay. You can find a citizen science project for tracking the time near you on our website.

That's ScienceFriday.com slash king tide, and it's all there for everybody to take advantage Imagine a great citizen science project. I want to thank all my guests. Thank you all for joining me this hour. Thank you, Ira. Thanks, Iris. You're welcome. Charles Berkwith is our director, a senior producer, Christopher Taliazza.

Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather. We had technical and engineering help today from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, and Kevin Wolf. And a quick program note, every year we celebrate Cephalopod Week. You know those amazing squids, cuddle fish, and octopuses? This June, you can join us in 10 cities across the country, for Cephalopod Movie Night from June 21st to 28th. Come on out for an evening of talks, tentacles, talent, a lot of fun. Go to ScienceFriday.com slash movie night to grab your ticket before somebody with four times as many arms grabs them first.

ScienceFriety.com slash movie night. It's going to be a great night of fun, Cephalopod movie night from June 21st to 28th, ScienceFriiday.com slash movie night. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato in New York. Thank you.