“Is that coast safe for us?” the navigator and the skipper are asking each other.
This week’s letter adds another checklist item to our List of climateproof indicators, those measures that help us evaluate our hometown’s ability to protect residents from climate change. The new one is
Do we live in a coastal county?
OBVIOUS OR SUBTLE?
Of course each of us knows whether we live in a coastal county. Sea level rise and flooding aren’t hidden, so where’s the unseen climate danger? Like so many others discussed in ClimateDog, this danger is financial. It’s easy, but shortsighted, to think we’re not threatened just because our home is miles away from the coast. Relatively few of us in a coastal county will suffer from physical dangers such as storm damage, ocean flooding, erosion, or sea level rise. But across the county those costs are going to be big - and soon.
Coastal communities in the contiguous U.S. face more than $400 billion in costs over the next 20 years, much of it sooner, to defend coastal communities from inevitable sea-level rise . . .
And those arbitrary county lines - as well as state lines - can determine if we’ll be hit by the financial impacts of climate damages - or the costs to build protections. Where’s this money going to come from? Some from our town coffers, if they contain any funds. Some from the federal government, maybe. But most will come from state and county departments - for which we pay taxes! Or from state and county bond issues, on which we pay interest.
. . . For hundreds of small coastal and tidal communities identified in the report, the costs will far outstrip their ability to pay, making retreat and abandonment the only viable option unless enormous amounts of financing emerge in a very short period of time. As just one example of the scope and gravity of this problem, in 178 small communities the cost of building basic coastal defenses is more than $100,000 per person. [Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development 2019]
UNNOTICED, ACCESS TO BOND ISSUES IS GETTING HARDER.
Climate change is not just increasing damage; it’s putting the funds needed to cope with it farther out of reach.
The US relies upon state and local governments to build, operate, maintain, and pay for most non-defense-related public infrastructure. State and local governments, in turn, rely upon the municipal bond market to raise capital for infrastructure projects. Climate change threatens to upend this system.
Wall Street has begun to take climate risk into account in municipal bond pricing, making it harder for some state and local governments to raise capital. These developments threaten public health, safety, and welfare, nationwide. [Albany Law School Institute for Financial Market Regulation]
AND THOSE COSTS FOR CLIMATE DEFENSES ARE JUST THE START.
The big costs to coastal counties will be indirect damages such as falling tourism revenue, rising health and safety costs, and the big one, flattening home values. Imagine would-be homebuyers saying to themselves, “The Ocean State? The Bay State? Sounds wet. The Green Mountain State and the Granite State sound much safer.”
Booming real estate prices hide the fact that sea level rise is already depressing the value of many properties. Studies by The First Street Foundation find that, while most homes are gaining value these days, those in floodable areas are gaining value significantly more slowly than similar homes in safer areas.
ARE BUDDY AND I TAKING OUR OWN ADVICE?
Next week our family is moving from within a quarter mile of the Atlantic Ocean in Rhode Island to about the same distance from the Pacific Ocean in Washington State. Both homes are in coastal counties. Sounds like we haven’t been reading ClimateDog!
But some things are more important than sanity. And for our family who have spent years living on boats, smelling salt air, and staring at the horizon, a coastal home is just about a must. We’ve tried hard to choose a community with few other climate dangers, but Skagit County and Washington State will be hit with climate costs - and we know we’ll be sharing them.
We wish you a great life in your new home. It's a beautiful area, not far from where I grew up (before I met you). I hope you'll be happy there, and that you'll be safe. I know you know that planning under these circumstances is very difficult - to be honest, everything must be presented as probabilities, and those probabilities aren't smooth either - the real world events will appear stochastically. But your newsletter is consistently intelligent and thoughtful, and helps all its readers learn the dimensions of the problem. We wish you a great new adventure.
-Frank and family.