The Decibel - Floods, storms, rising sea levels — why do we build on the coast?

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

In 2019, Nova Scotia’s then-Liberal government passed the Coastal Protection Act — legislation that would have brought in regulations around building near the coast. In 2021, the Conservatives were voted into power, and it sounded like they were keen to keep the Act in place.But in February 2024, Nova Scotia’s government announced that they wouldn’t. Instead, the responsibility for regulating coastal development would be downloaded onto municipalities, and in some cases, even homeowners.Matthew McClearn is a data journalist for the Globe’s energy and environment team. He’s on the show to talk about what Nova Scotia’s abandonment of the Coastal Protection Act tells us about their approach to climate adaptation, and what happens when a province makes climate change an issue of personal responsibility.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Well, I'm from Nova Scotia originally, and I still have connections there. I still spend some time in the summers typically out there. Matt McClern is a Globe investigative reporter and data journalist covering energy and the environment. And for years I'd been seeing these Coastal Protection Act signs. Nova Scotia's Coastal Protection Act was meant to bring in regulations around building close to the shore. That would reduce the likelihood of property damage from extreme storms and rising sea levels, both of which seem to be getting worse with climate change. But though the act was passed five years ago, regulations have never been put in place.

It's a big question for coastal communities. How are you going to deal with sea level rise? How are you going to deal with increased flooding, perhaps increased storm intensity? All these things are things that communities have to respond to. And the Coastal Protection Act was an interesting example of adaptation. And so is abandoning that approach and downloading responsibility. That's an interesting approach to adaptation, too. One that's likely to have potential consequences in the future.

Because this act is dead, housing developments are continuing in places where they may be vulnerable to erosion, storms and sea level rise. So today, Matt's on the show to tell us about Nova Scotia's approach to coastal development and what happens when a provincial government makes climate change an issue of personal responsibility. I'm Maina Karaman-Wellms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Matt, thanks so much for being here. It's a pleasure to be here, as always. So Matt, Nova Scotia has being here. It's a pleasure to be here, as always. So, Matt, Nova Scotia has a lot of coastline, and I understand that a lot of houses are actually built pretty close to the ocean.

Why is that? Well, it's primarily historical. I mean, Nova Scotia was one of the first places to be settled by Europeans. And, you know, back then there was not a highway system to allow you to get around Nova Scotia. The sea was the best way to get around. The sea also had plenty of resources, notably, say, fisheries. And so lots of communities just sprung up right along the coast for geographical reasons. And if you look at a map of Nova Scotia, it is all coastline, right? So these were natural places to settle. There are obviously some places today inland and long have been. But but Nova Scotia is truly a coastal province. So people are used to living next to the water, I guess. Historically, then, Matt, how would people deal with protection structures as people try to protect their land from erosion, which is a natural process that goes on forever.

But if you buy a piece of land and you don't want to see the ocean take it, sometimes you take measures to protect it. And there's a long tradition of erecting rock walls along the Nova Scotia coastline in order to protect property. You see it all the time. One of the more modern ways to address this concerns was the Coastal Protection Act, which was introduced to Nova Scotia in 2019. So there was this legislation that was introduced, Matt. What exactly was in that legislation? What was it supposed to do? It basically said that the province was going to establish this coastal protection zone.

And within this zone, they were going to regulate development. And probably this would have led to vertical and horizontal setbacks being imposed so that you couldn't build something right along the shoreline, for example. You would have to build it further inland. And if your land wasn't large enough, then you might not be able to build at all. It would also have to be some specified distance above sea level. And the point of this essentially is to anticipate any damage from climate change, right? So rising sea levels or big storms then. That's right. It wasn't an attempt to completely halt development along the coast. And it contemplated these designated professionals that you might have to turn to when building a project on the coast to get them to sign off that

what your development was consistent with the act, right? But it would have restricted development. It would have been a province-wide application of rules rather than just municipality to municipality. But municipalities would not be allowed to issue building permits if a development weren't consistent with the act. And as you referenced there, though, Matt, the legislation hasn't actually been enacted. So what happened? Well, the legislation actually passed. But what the government next needed to do was set the regulations that were going to flow from the act. So basically lay out the rules.

And for a period of time, it looked like the government was doing that. And then at some point, and we don't know exactly why, the government just stopped doing that. And then early this year, they announced that they were taking a different approach. Back in February, they said,

we have a new approach. We are not going to enact regulations on this as we had originally thought we were going to do. We're taking a different approach. And so, Matt, what did the provincial government announce in February? Well, they issued a report to the public laying out what their new approach was going to be. And basically, at that time, they admitted that the Coastal Protection Act was not going to be promulgated, basically. But they explained what their new approach was. And basically, it's a plan of providing information to Nova Scotians so that they can make informed decisions. They published flood maps at that time. But the government has said, we don't want to tell everyone what to do.

We're just a bunch of bureaucrats in Halifax. We think local communities, local municipalities, and also homeowners should make these decisions for themselves. They know their properties and communities best. And so the government effectively downloaded responsibility for this to Nova Scotians and their municipal governments. The Coastal Protection Act was dead. I believe there was a change of government from 2019 to the current time, right?

Matt, does that play into this? The government that enacted it, the Coastal Protection Act, was a liberal government. This is in 2019 then? Yes. And interestingly, in reporting for this, I went back and looked at the handsets from the Nova Scotia legislature to see the debates that had taken place when this was passed. And interestingly, there was very little debate, discussion, or dispute of any kind about it. There seemed to be broad support for the Coastal Protection Act. But there was a change in government, and the new conservative government at first seemed quite supportive of the Coastal Protection Act. And again, we don't know exactly why they changed

their tune, but they certainly did. There's no vocal group in Nova Scotia that I'm aware of that really campaigned against the Coastal Protection Act, not publicly anyway. But you can imagine that there would be people who would be unhappy with this. One might imagine that developers might have a problem with it, but it's not as if there was any one or even a few groups that vocally oppose this. And when you're driving around rural Nova Scotia, you see plenty of supportive signs for the Coastal Protection Act. You don't see, or at least I haven't seen, any signs opposing it. So it is rather curious that this happened. Just basically, Matt, why would people be in

support of this? Why would they think this is a good idea? Well, Nova Scotia is a coastal province, and I think there's probably greater awareness of coastal issues there as a result. A lot of people live in communities. They are aware of what it means to live on the ocean, and they probably also see a lot of things that they may think unwise. You know, they may see properties being built right on the ocean or structures that they disagree with and they would like to see regulated. So I think this did have some sort of widespread political appeal for people. So what are the consequences then of the Coastal Protection Act not being enacted?

Well, it just means that things will revert to the way things were before. Basically, local areas will regulate this if they see fit or not regulate it. And landowners will have a much greater say in what they do on their properties and fewer restrictions. We have seen a lot of development along the coastline, some of it very close to the coast. Some of it you might say is ill-advised, and that we can expect will continue because people have the freedom to do it. Matt, with the Coastal Protection Act essentially gone then, the province has basically downloaded that responsibility onto the municipalities. So have they worked out their own regulations? Some of them have.

Some of them were already regulating this before the province considered stepping in. So Lunenburg County, they regulated it before. They have actually introduced their own new rules, updated rules recently. And Halifax is another municipality that is considering making changes as well. So it's happening, but there are 49 municipalities in Nova Scotia. Some of them are very small, very rural, don't have a ton of resources. So it's unclear when or whether some of these municipalities will address this. They have all sorts of other competing issues as well that they may be focused on at this point.

I guess I wonder, are there more incentives for municipalities to do this? There may in fact be incentives forized to not regulate this to allow development and also to make themselves more attractive to developers than communities that are regulating it. And so you might actually see some communities deliberately not set rules so that they can attract new homes, new businesses to their coastal areas and reap the tax benefits that come along by allowing these properties to be built. Whether or not that's a wise decision based on the realities of these particular areas of shoreline. We'll be back in a minute. Okay, so Nova Scotia has taken this approach that shifts the responsibility to the municipality or even to the homeowners.

Is this different from how other coastal areas handle this issue, Matt? So right now, our responses to coastal development, particularly in the era of sea level rise, seem to me to be in their infancy. Approaches are sort of all over the map. If you go to certain areas in the United States, for example, that are suffering significant inland flooding during hurricane events or other big storms, some of these areas are suffering so badly that governments are doing what are called buyouts, where the government offers homeowners money for their homes, basically, and says, we want to basically demolish your neighborhood because we feel we can no longer protect it from inundation. And so that's a very interventionalist approach. It's a very expensive approach, but it is happening in certain places. It's hard to execute, as you can imagine,

because getting an entire area to clear out can be quite difficult. I think South Carolina is a good example of a place that's taking a more interventionalist approach. After a number of damaging storms, they've created a special office of resilience that's intended to address some of these long-term risks that they face. And they are not downloading it to the public. Of course, the reason behind not building close to the shore is because that would make properties more vulnerable, right, to the effects of climate change, rising sea levels, and also extreme storms. So let me just ask you about the effects of those things on Nova Scotia in particular

in the last little while. So Matt, how does the government approach how they deal with natural disasters in Nova Scotia? Well, in terms of recovery, one of the things that they have, like all provinces pretty much, is a system for disaster relief funding. between the provinces and the federal government when a serious event like a massive hurricane blows through that affects enough people that they decide to designate it as a natural disaster for which disaster relief funding is available. Don't think of it like an insurance policy. It's really just – this is funding that the government gives to people who have been – who suffered significant property damage and basically just to get them

on their feet. Like, you know, for example, it might say, we'll give you several hundred dollars for a new refrigerator. If you lost your refrigerator, you know, we'll give you so much for this and that. It's really just to help people start to get recovered. And typically, you know, if it covered about a third of your damages, you'd be lucky, right? There's one more thing to say about disaster relief funding, though. Part of the government's approach, what they announced back in February, and it's consistent with this sort of laissez-faire approach that they're taking. They said they would reevaluate the cap on disaster relief funding to discourage rebuilding repeatedly in at-risk areas. And they didn't say much more about it than that.

And they haven't done it yet, as far as I'm aware. Last time I spoke to the government, they said that they were considering changes to the disaster relief funding scheme. But this is something we've seen before. And I think it is consistent with what the government is saying. They're saying, we're going to download responsibility. But they really mean responsibility. Like, you know, if you build something in a high risk zone, the government's saying, we may not be there for you when a disaster blows through and your home is impacted, but they haven't really spelled out how they're going to do that. It would be a significant change.

Yeah. Because this is something like when you do see a disaster blow through, a lot of people sometimes rely on that assistance from government. I guess I wonder in those moments, though, the federal government implemented a flood mapping program for the entire country, and they would help provinces. They would provide money basically to allow provinces to create their own flood maps. But there were strings attached. And one of them was that once an area was designated a flood hazard zone, if development happened in that area, then the federal government would not provide disaster funding relief for those properties. So very similar to what the Nova Scotia government is saying they want to do now. But in that instance, it's my understanding there was no system for the federal government or anybody else to determine whether some of these homes have been built subsequent to the flood mapping.

There was no real system for the government to enforce that. And that flood mapping program was canceled in the 1990s. And part of the lore around it is that the government realized that it was probably paying out for properties like that and was frustrated to see that provinces were not preventing development in some of these high-risk areas. And so what the Nova Scotia government is saying now, they've provided so little detail that we don't really know how this is going to be implemented or even whether it will be implemented. But history gives us some guides about why we might want to be skeptical about what they're saying. It's very hard to do that. And the last thing to say about it is that traditionally, after any natural disaster, if you watch the news, you'll see that politicians like to arrive and tell people and reassure people that their government is there for them. You can imagine it'd be a very different kind of message if they're showing up and telling people, well, you know, this community, we are not going to help because we warned them or we published

flood maps years ago and they went ahead and built anyway. It's just not a message that politically is easy to deliver. It's hard to imagine people doing it. Maybe in the future, we will see more of that, but we haven't seen a lot of it in the past, I don't think. Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. It's a pleasure as always. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wellms. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show.

Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.