Through The Sandglass

Some folk who ARE planning for rising sea levels

 
Kiribati. OK, I knew the name, but I had to check the map, too. A group of atolls straddling the equator over an area of 3.5 million square kilometres that host a population of 113,000 people; south of the Marshall Islands, North of Tuvalu and Fiji:

 
But those 113,000 people have a government that thinks ahead – and thinks on their behalf. Continuing my thematic rant, accompanied by the sounds of thundering timpani (think crashing storm surge waves), I invite you to compare the policies of the Government of the Republic of Kiribati with the posturing and lobbying of the vested interests elsewhere in the world (I couldn’t possibly comment more specifically). The thing is that the Kiribati authorities recognise that sea levels are rising and that their entire nation is made up of low-lying land which is already being battered and reduced by tides and storms.

Here, in a recent report from the UK’s Daily Telegraph, is what they are planning:

Entire nation of Kiribati to be relocated over rising sea level threat

The low-lying Pacific nation of Kiribati is negotiating to buy land in Fiji so it can relocate islanders under threat from rising sea levels.

By Paul Chapman, Wellington

In what could be the world's first climate-induced migration of modern times, Anote Tong, the Kiribati president, said he was in talks with Fiji's military government to buy up to 5,000 acres of freehold land on which his countrymen could be housed. Some of Kiribati's 32 pancake-flat coral atolls, which straddle the equator over 1,350,000 square miles of ocean, are already disappearing beneath the waves.

Most of its 113,000 people are crammed on to Tarawa, the administrative centre, a chain of islets which curve in a horseshoe shape around a lagoon.

"This is the last resort, there's no way out of this one," Mr Tong said. "Our people will have to move as the tides have reached our homes and villages."

Mr Tong said the plan would be to send a trickle of skilled workers first, so they could merge more easily with the Fijian population and make a positive contribution to that country's economy.

"We don't want 100,000 people from Kiribati coming to Fiji in one go," he told the state-run Fiji One television channel.

"They need to find employment, not as refugees but as immigrant people with skills to offer, people who have a place in the community, people who will not be seen as second-class citizens.

"What we need is the international community to come up with an urgent funding package to deal with that ambition, and the needs of countries like Kiribati."

The land Kiribati wants to buy is understood to be on Vanua Levu, Fiji's second largest island.

Mr Tong's proposal is the latest in an increasingly desperate search for solutions.

Last year he suggested the possibility of constructing man-made islands like oil rigs for people to live on.

His government has launched an Education for Migration programme, aimed at upskilling its population to make them more attractive as migrants.

Kiribati youngsters study for degrees at the University of the South Pacific, which is based in the Fijian capital of Suva and jointly owned by 12 Pacific island countries. Dr Alumita Durulato, a lecturer in international affairs at the university, said: "They are already preparing quite well. They have educated their youth to be able to survive in the new lands that they want to go to. They are going to leave behind their culture, their way of life and lifestyle, which is a little bit different from ours in Fiji."

Tarawa lies 1,400 miles from Suva and some i-Kiribati, as the islanders are known, hold concerns about whether their culture would survive after the population moves, especially if those who leave first are mainly the young.

A member of the Commonwealth, Kiribati was known as the Gilbert islands until independence from Britain in 1979. The islands were first named after Thomas Gilbert, a British naval captain who navigated the archipelago in 1788, Kiribati being the local pronunciation of "Gilbert". The total land area is 313 square miles and none of the coral atolls rises more than a few feet above sea level.

Just go and have a look at the Climate Change Unit website of the Environment and Conservation Division of Kiribati, and I suspect that you will be impressed. Check out all their resources and links. These people are addressing climate change adaptation in the most dramatic yet realistic and thoughtful way possible - perhaps they could act as expert advisors to coastal communities elsewhere in the world?

Oh, and by the way, Kiribati is where the latest developments in the search for Amelia Earhart’s plane are making the news.

 

[Photos of Kiribati flooding from the Environment and Conservation Division website; satellite image of Aranuka atoll courtesy Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center]

The costs of ignoring science

 
Cue sounds of timpani, stage left and stage right. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a drum-banging post about coastal management myopia; now, recent reports compel me to continue my instrumental activity. So let’s think a little about the implications of rising sea levels (emphasis on the word think).

It is a fact (which I choose to define as something supported by observation, measurement, and analysis – in other words, science) that sea levels have been rising and it is reasonable to infer that this will continue. The world is, in general, warming, and the laws of physics (if you choose to accept them) require that warming oceans expand in volume; the cause of the warming, and any so-called debate over human influence, is irrelevant. Expanding ocean volumes have to go somewhere, and that somewhere is, inevitably, low-lying coastal land. OK so far? Anything really to challenge here? Those questions are, of course, essentially rhetorical since I have good reason to believe that readers of this blog are capable of independent, rational thought. Now here’s the tricky bit: predicting the magnitude of future sea level rise at any place on the planet is not easy – there is (oh dear) some uncertainty associated with this. But perhaps we can, nevertheless, attempt to come to grips with this uncertainty, and plan accordingly? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be “no.”

In that previous post, I mentioned NC20, the lobbying organisation of twenty North Carolina counties, who declare that they “concentrate primarily on actions to prevent regulation and rule making not based on science.” That statement would imply that, in turn, they would support regulation that is based on science, yes? No. When presented with a report by the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission (CRC) in which a group of nineteen scientists presented an assessment of sea level rise, the response by the NC20 Board Members (credentials) was as follows:

Perhaps the most impressive accomplishment to date was the complete reversal of the draft policy of CRC regarding Sea Level Rise (SLR). The draft policy presented by the Science Panel of the CRC mandated a planning component of 39 inches of SLR across the CAMA area. NC 20 Board members met in a private meeting with the Chair of the CRC and carefully laid out the unscientific assumptions used in the draft report, showing the numerous errors and inconsistencies. In the final presentation, all “mandates” were removed and the final document showed a sensitivity to the needs of the counties, the role of the CRC, and the need for a relationship characterized by scientific advice and assistance on the part of the CRC rather than ironfisted dictates. The “redlined” version of that final document is attached for your review.

Follow the link and you will see the original policy wording (deleted) and its replacement (I shall resist commenting):

And here, just for a laugh, are the "unscientific assumptions" on North Carolina sea-level rise (taken from the CRC report):

So this really is about noise: the decibels from the drumbeats and grinding axes of vested interest lobbying easily drown out the voices of nineteen scientists.

But for those who heroically maintain an interest in science and how it can inform planning and economics, let’s turn to the couple of recent reports that I mentioned, that address exactly this topic. First, there has been a fair level of justified (but not particularly cacophonous) buzz in the media about a report from Climate Central titled Surging Seas: Sea level rise, storms, and global warming’s threat to the US coast, published on the 14th March, simultaneously with the research being published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters. Two pieces from the New York Times (grounds, I sadly realise, for them to be dismissed), one by Andy Revkin, the other by Justin Gillis, summarise the findings from the report. As Revkin quotes from the report, which makes it clear that it is not simple sea level rise itself, but associated storm surges that represent the threat:

Rising seas dramatically increase the odds of damaging floods from storm surges. For over two-thirds of the locations analyzed (and for 85% of sites outside the Gulf of Mexico), past and future global warming more than doubles the estimated odds of “century” or worse floods occurring within the next 18 years — meaning floods so high they would historically be expected just once per century. For over half the locations analyzed, warming at least triples the odds of century-plus floods over the same period. And for two-thirds the locations, sea level rise from warming has already more than doubled the odds of such a flood even this year….

Sea level rise has already cost governments and private landowners billions of dollars as they have pumped sand onto eroding beaches and repaired the damage from storm surges.

Insurance companies got out of the business of writing flood insurance decades ago, so much of the risk from sea level rise is expected to fall on the financially troubled National Flood Insurance Program, set up by Congress, or on state insurance pools. Federal taxpayers also heavily subsidize coastal development when the government pays to rebuild infrastructure destroyed in storm surges and picks up much of the bill for private losses not covered by insurance.

For decades, coastal scientists have argued that these policies are foolhardy, and that the nation must begin planning an orderly retreat from large portions of its coasts, but few politicians have been willing to embrace that message or to warn the public of the rising risks.

Some further selected key points:

• By 2030, storm surges combined with rising seas could raise waters to 4 feet (1.2 metres) or more above high tide lines at many locations; 4.9 million people live in 2.6 million homes in this vulnerable zone between the observed high tide and the top of expected flood waters.
• In 285 coastal cities and towns, more than half the population lives below the 4-foot mark, the Climate Central report found. Florida has 106 of these at-risk municipalities; Louisiana has 65, New Jersey and North Carolina have 22 each, Maryland has 14, New York has 13 and Virginia has 10.
• For two-thirds of the locations, sea level rise from warming has already at least doubled the annual risk of century-plus floods.
• The population and homes exposed are just part of the story. Flooding to four feet would reach higher than a huge amount of dry land, covering some 3.0 million acres of roads, bridges, commercial buildings, military bases, agricultural lands, toxic waste dumps, schools, hospitals, and more.

And a couple of quotes from Ben Strauss, one of the lead scientists authoring the report:

Sea level rise is like an invisible tsunami, building force while we do almost nothing. We have a closing window of time to prevent the worst by preparing for higher seas….

A lot of the state [of Florida] is built on porous bedrock, bedrock that's like Swiss cheese. You can't practically build a wall to keep the sea out. The water will come up through the ground….

Right now the projection for the end of the century is two to seven feet of sea level rise and seven feet would put a lot of Lower Manhattan under water if we didn’t build sea walls to protect it. 

So, if the Board of NC20 were to read this report, what would they find about their state? Well, the report’s website has an excellent interactive map, and a series of fact sheets on each state; here are some headlines for North Carolina:

• Odds of a 100‐year flood or worse by 2030, with sea level rise from global warming: 24% (odds without global warming: 9%)
• Historic local sea level rise rate: 0.8 inches/decade; projected new sea level rise by 2050: 11 inches 
• Population at risk: 76,000
• Homes at risk: 56,000 
• Land area at risk: 1.2 million acres
• Towns and cities where at least half the population is at risk: 22 
• Counties where at least 10% of the population is at risk: 9
  

Perhaps grounds for a little planning effort? Supported by facts? Incorporating some science?

And then there’s the recently published study whose focus is on California; the study "Estimating the Potential Economic Impacts of Climate Change on Southern California Beaches," is featured in a special edition of the peer-reviewed journal Climatic Change, and is the work of researchers at Duke University. The study again looks at the effects of sea level rise in the long term, and the short term effects of storms. As reported in Science Daily  last month:

While some beaches may shrink or possibly disappear, others are poised to remain relatively large -- leaving an uneven distribution of economic gains and losses for coastal beach towns, according to a study by researchers at Duke University and five other institutions.

"Some beaches actually stand to benefit economically from sea level rise, creating winners and losers among California beach towns," said Linwood Pendleton, director of ocean and coastal policy at Duke's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. "We found, as relatively small beaches shrink more due to sea level rise, people will stop visiting them, opting for wider beaches."

The same topic was addressed last year in a report by economists at San Francisco State University that examined the economic effects of sea level rise and storms on five California coastal communities:

The results suggest that visitor hotspots like Venice Beach could lose up to $440 million in tourism revenue between now and 2100 if sea levels rise by 4.6 feet (1.4 meters), a projection specific to the California coast, based on recent scientific studies. At San Francisco's Ocean Beach, accelerated erosion could cause up to $540 million worth of damage.

"Sea level rise will send reverberations throughout local and state economies," said Philip King, associate professor of economics at San Francisco State University. "We also found that the economic risks and responses to a changing coastline will vary greatly over time and from beach to beach."

Here, as an example, are the estimated impacts on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach: 

Ocean Beach (north of Sloat Boulevard), San Francisco County

Based on a sea level rise estimate of 4.6 feet (1.4 meters) by 2100, Ocean Beach could lose:

• $19.6 million in damages caused by a 100-year coastal flood damaging homes and contents. This is an increase of 200 percent from the present day risk of a 100-year flood, which is $6.5 million
• $82 million in tourism spending and local and state tax revenue losses (accumulated between now and 2100) caused by a narrower, eroded beach attracting fewer visitors
• $16.5 million in habitat and recreation losses, caused by erosion reducing the beach area by 92 percent (53 acres lost). Ocean Beach provides a habitat for native species such as the Western Snowy Plover, a bird that is federally listed as a threatened species
• $540 million caused by land, buildings and infrastructure being lost or damaged by erosion and subsidence

The facts, the predictions, the costs, the social implications, are there to be found, whether the result of work by universities, government agencies, or – as I happened upon – even the real estate “community.” The property site, World Property Channel, published the results of a “Special report: Long Island, Miami Have Highest Property Exposure to Storm Surge Damage as Hurricane Season Approaches” that was accompanied by dramatic graphics and the following figures:

Of the metro areas studied in the report, Long Island was found to have the highest exposure to risk, valued at $99 billion, followed by the Miami-Palm Beach region and Virginia Beach. Projected exposure to storm surge damage for the ten geographies is as follows:

Long Island, NY - $99 billion, Miami-Dade, FL - $44.9 billion, Virginia Beach, VA - $44.6 billion, New Orleans, LA - $39 billion, Tampa, FL - $27 billion, Houston, TX - $20 billion, Jacksonville, FL - $19.6 billion, Charleston, SC - $17.7 billion, Corpus Christi, TX - $4.7 billion, Mobile, AL - $3 billion

But, silly me, I’m forgetting that all this work, all these “facts," are flawed by “unscientific assumptions… showing the numerous errors and inconsistencies.”

 

[Photographs: the surge before the storm swamps Galveston Island, Texas, and a fire destroys homes along the beach as Hurricane Ike approaches. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip). Flooding over access road 523 to Surfside beach, caused by Hurricane Ike forming in the Gulf of Mexico, is seen near Surfside Beach, Texas. (REUTERS/Carlos Barria). And http://myhydros.org/more-about-water/storm-surge/]

 

 

An artist's view of Holland's inland sand seas

A while ago, I wrote a couple of posts on “the European sand belt, a great swathe of lowlands covered, more or less, by aeolian sand deposits originating from the chaos left behind by the retreat of the Ice Age glaciers,” the second with a focus on the Dutch dunes of Hulshorst in the Veluwe region. Recently, I was delighted to see a new comment on this post, from Francien Solitar, who wrote:

My stepdad was P.H.Mullaard. He lived in Ermelo and painted the Hulshorster zanddunes in more than one painting. (see: Mullaard.com) He spoke with a forest keeper there and he was told that, when there is a thunderstorm in the area, there seems to be an unusual amount of lightning flashes that hit the dunes and make craters in the ground.

I immediately went to the website that Francien is developing, showcasing Piet Mullaard’s works, and at the same time took the liberty of contacting her by email. This is yet another of those immensely satisfying “out of the blue” contacts that arise through the blog, and Francien responded immediately and graciously. She lived in the town of Ermelo (see the image below), and was a schoolteacher there before later emigrating to Canada in 1976.

As the website describes, “Piet Mullaard was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He lived and worked in Hillegersberg, Ermelo, Groningen and Bilthoven. He was an autodidact and worked as a painter and sculptor. He left a collection of about 150 paintings and 25 sculptures. Most of the collection is now in Canada.” Francien very kindly gave me permission to reproduce some of her stepfather’s paintings of the Dutch sand belt; the painting at the head of the post is  Sand Dunes at the Veluwe (1947, oil on canvas, 126 x 100 cm). Below are Uprooted Trees in the Sand (1946, oil on canvas,88 x 64 cm) and The Small Drift Sand (1946, canvas, 60 x 40 cm).

 

These are wonderfully atmospheric paintings in the great Dutch tradition, and a very satisfying link between landscapes, geology, sand, and art – thanks, Francien, for drawing our attention to your stepfather’s work!

 

[Photo with the Google Earth image from the Ministerie van Economische Zaken, Landbouw, en Innovatie website.]

"Our own little bridge to nowhere"

As someone who tries to write regularly on diverse topics that not only interest me, but, hopefully, interest others, an occasional gift horse appears, or, to mix metaphors, a whopping great drum that is just asking to be beaten – again. There have been a few drums over the course of this blog, but none appearing so regularly as the one representing the issues of coastal management – a veritable timpano, together with seductively large drumsticks just begging to be taken up and used. And here’s that drum again. 

 
Last year, I wrote a short piece on the aftermath of Hurricane Irene on the barrier islands of the Outer Banks. By the time the storm hit Hatteras, it was no longer a major hurricane, but nevertheless, it played the game that storms and barrier islands have always enjoyed, dramatically re-designing the geography by creating new inlets that sliced and diced the thin strips of sand. Highway 12, the “lifeline” of the Outer Banks, was cut in two places. As described in this New York Times article (titled “A North Carolina Lifeline Built on Shifting Sands” and spotted by an alert reader, Stephan Bossert), a temporary bridge was quickly constructed and the highway was back in operation in October last year. But “temporary” just goes with the territory in the saga of a barrier island, and the bridge is already in trouble:

By January, engineers were reinforcing its southern approach with sandbags and rock trucked in from the mainland, in hopes of keeping the road open until a more permanent fix could be designed and built.

And, unfortunately, this is only one of a series of problems that afflict this shape-shifting chain of islands:

Last summer, the state confronted what engineers called “advanced deterioration” of the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge, which carries the highway from Nags Head to the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, on the north end of Hatteras Island… The state opted for a replacement bridge that will run right alongside the existing span; planning is under way.

Now I have cited on numerous occasions in this blog, the wisdom of Robert S. Young, a coastal geologist who is head of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, in particular during the Gulf Coast berms fiasco. Young calls the replacement bridge project “our own little bridge to nowhere.”

They can engineer that bridge so well that it can withstand a Category 3 or 4 hurricane,” Dr. Young said in a telephone interview. “The barrier island it is connected to cannot."

And there is the nail (or the drum) hit firmly on the head. As the NYT article notes:

Barrier islands like the Outer Banks are inherently unstable. Waves typically strike these islands at a slight angle, creating currents that pick up sand and carry it along the coast. The wave energy along the Outer Banks is unusually strong; by some estimates 700,000 cubic yards of sand, enough to fill 70,000 average-size dump trucks, moves along that stretch of coast every year.

At the new bridge, evidence of this process appeared even on opening day, in the form of long-necked black water birds called cormorants perching on a spit of sand that had formed near the north side of the bridge. That spit had not been there a few days before, said Pablo Hernandez, the transportation department engineer who managed the bridge work.

“It’s very difficult,” he said. “This whole thing has been constantly moving and shifting.”

As he spoke, waves were already starting to cut sharply into the sand at the bridge’s southern flank, an area the engineers later reinforced.

and

Already, Highway 12 floods repeatedly and is often cut by storms. Maintaining it “is totally a lost cause,” said Stanley R. Riggs, a coastal scientist at East Carolina University who is an author of a new book, “The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast,” which describes in depressing detail the difficulties of keeping the road open. “It will bankrupt the state,” he said.

Now that book by Riggs and his colleagues is clearly one to add to the top of the list, another rational discussion of the science – what we know and what we don’t know – in managing complex coastal systems. But, as has been the case on so many occasions and in so many different places, the science is ignored and its proponents branded as pessimists in the face of vested commercial and residential interests. The loudest beating of the drum comes from lobbying groups who have the clout that mere academics do not. In this particular case, it’s the likes of NC20 and The Land Alliance of North Carolina. “Better Science for Better Policy” is the rallying cry of the latter group, and one of the former’s goals (mixed in with links to alternative views of man’s effect on climate change) is “To advocate for science based environmental rulemaking in all areas of environmental regulation.” These groups play the tired old game of “the science isn’t conclusive” to audiences who are not equipped to judge whether this is reasonable or even relevant. It’s a tired old game, but it’s an axe that grinds loudly (along with the timpani). These groups trumpet (is there no end to the orchestral references?) their major victory of persuading the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission to emasculate the section in their recent planning document that addressed issues of sea-level rise.

Sections of the book by Stanley Riggs et al. can be viewed online, and the first chapter, “Why is there a coastal conflict?” concludes with the following statement – one for which the biggest drum, the loudest axe, and the most brazen trumpet should be made available and listened to:

Our vision for the future of coastal North Carolina now requires the wisdom of policymakers and the concerted efforts of the public, coastal businesses, government agencies, and politicians to integrate science into management, informed by an awareness that our changing coastal system has natural limits to growth and development. If we are sufficiently farsighted, we can sustain a viable coastal economy in relation to the processes of change and, in doing so, preserve the natural resources on which that economy is based. As a result, more potential economic benefits would arise in the future than the current approach to coastal development could provide.

What are our alternatives? We must understand how the coastal system works and accept that reality. We must consider the challenges of coastal change to be opportunities. We can then determine the best ways to maintain our coastal economy and new ways to make a living on the coast. We should embrace the historical culture and the wild remoteness of the barrier islands and parlay those attributes into economic advantage.

A personal bloggy milestone

I realise that, in the grand panoply of the global blogosphere, this is but a mote of dust, on a scale more diminutive than a grain of fine sand tossed into the vastness of the universe. BUT, if you had asked me, some three-and-a-bit years ago, as I hesitatingly tapped out my first post, to visualise 200,000 visits to this blog, I would have laughed at the preposterosity of such an idea. However, yesterday evening (Jakarta time), the image above appeared on my Typepad dashboard.

I still can’t quite believe it. I know that this milestone is, in large part, the result of repeated visits by a small number of dedicated readers, and to all of you, my eternal gratitude. The remainder of this statistic is made up of the serendipitous visitors – and, should you be one of those who happens on this post and lingers long enough to read it, thank you. It’s a pleasure, for example, to see how the activity drops off during school holidays, leading me to conclude that I am somehow helping someone out with something that they wanted (or at least needed) to know. It’s a periodic fascination to look at the “keywords” analysis that shows me how a particular search term has led someone here – a selection from the last couple of hours:

• Coastal tourist complexes
• sand grains which have been magnified
• You have a 7-minute sand timer and an 11-minute sand timer. How can you use them to cook a piece of…
• global sediment discharge
• murano glass factory in venice
• permo-triassic event
• bacillus pasteurii uses
• alcanivorax borkumensis oil spill
• 2004 tsunami
• pink coral with tentacles
• verkhoyansk mts map

plus, of course, the ever-popular “Andrew Clemens.”

It’s not that I scrutinise and analyse these things on a daily basis, but it’s intriguing, to say the least. So there we are, enough introspection – but all this brings an added dimension to life that I never anticipated, and which is very much appreciated.

Chinese New Year and an Indonesian Sand Artist

A few weeks ago, Chinese New Year was being celebrated. In Indonesia it’s known as “Imlek,” and Jakarta certainly celebrated. For us, this was truly remarkable since, when we were last here 20 years ago, you still had to vouch on the immigration form that you not only were not carrying explosives, but that you had nothing with Chinese writing on it. Some things have improved in the intervening years.

We are now in the Year of the Dragon – the Water Dragon to be precise; I was born, with no choice, in the Year of the Dog – but at least it was a Fire Dog. Dragons were everywhere for Imlek – especially in commercial locations where they might induce a level of exuberance that would lead to purchasing stuff. The absurdly (and, given the overall social context, disturbingly) ritzy mall in our building complex was no exception. And, along with the dragons, came events. My eye was caught by a small item on the poster announcing these, between “Fiddle with 2 Strings,” and the “Dainty Lotus Dance” - “Grains of Sand.” Mystified, I hurried along one lunchtime, and watched a performance by “Indonesia’s only sand artist.” This is the art  of telling stories via continually changing hand-sculpted images in sand on an overhead projector. One of its celebrity proponents is Kseniya Simonova, who won “Ukraine’s Got Talent” with her work a couple of years ago. It may not be “great art” in the traditional sense, but it’s compelling to watch, it’s highly creative and requires impressive skills – I certainly couldn’t do it.

 

The Indonesian artist, “Denny Darko,” performed wearing a blindfold, and his story, topically, was “The Legend of Lotus Flower and the Dragon King.” You find your attention switching from the artist to the screen, watching his hands moving, pouring, scattering, and sculpting the sand, the grand sweeps dramatic, the small details meticulous and mysterious, images appearing and dissolving. And one of the compelling aspects is the expectation – a scene begins to take shape, but you have no idea what exactly it will be, until a detail begins to emerge and all is revealed. No, it may not be “great art,” but it’s really impressive, fascinating to watch, and a great way of visually telling a story.

A couple of images and a short movie: