Experts warn that new strategies are needed to combat emerging threat to US coastlines: 'Embracing an alliance'

Amid rising sea levels, people in coastal communities may need to change the way they deal with the relentlessly advancing waters.

What's happening?

It would behoove North Carolinians to alter their approach and work with nature rather than against it, Duke University marine biology student Ava Kocher wrote for the North Carolina Coastal Federation's Coastal Review.

She said residents were fighting a losing battle to maintain their properties along the state's coast, warning that seawalls and bulkheads were a waste of money and suggesting that living shorelines can help shift "this combative approach" as "a step in the right direction."

The Tarheel State's coastal marshes are shifting as rising global temperatures melt ice and expand seawater. These ecosystems are able to retreat with this slow onslaught — unless they are blocked by concrete or another human-made structure.

Alyson Flynn, an environmental economist at the North Carolina Coastal Federation, told Kocher that the construction of such infrastructure on individual properties has forced neighbors to put up the same walls, as their land was eroding faster without it. "They felt like the only way to protect their property was to also put up a seawall," she said. "And so then it had this barricading effect across the whole shoreline." 

Why is this important?

North Carolina will lose 98,000 acres of salt marsh by 2100, Coastwatch magazine reported last year. This is because rising sea levels are accelerating and outpacing land elevation gains.

The results include a higher water table and more frequent and severe floods — and all the problems that come with those symptoms of the rapidly overheating planet, such as increasing fatalities, property damage, and insurance costs from extreme weather events such as hurricanes.

"Sea level rise, that might be like your allergies … and then comes a hurricane," Christine Voss, a retired research associate at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill's Institute of Marine Sciences, told Kocher. "And because you may have been worn down by your allergies, when the cold or the pneumonia or the flu comes by, you're actually more susceptible."

Instead of hardening land in an impossible bid to ward off the sea, however, living shorelines — featuring plants, sand, or rock — can help mitigate risk and buy time, as one Havelock family showed. Kocher noted that homeowners Vernon and Michele Kelly chose this route instead of replacing a worn-out bulkhead.

"Minnows seem to have figured out, 'Hey, we've got a sort of … haven here.' I've seen an increase of blue crabs in that sill area. And I actually had one oyster starting to grow," Vernon Kelly said.

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"What we've done, it'll save it for my lifetime, maybe my kids. But if Mother Nature really decides she wants to do something, we can't stop her," he added.

What's being done about sea level rise?

As Vernon Kelly noted, this may be a long-term solution compared to a human lifespan, but it's actually temporary.

Because the warming of Earth is caused primarily by the burning of dirty energy sources, the solution is to transition to cleaner forms of power, such as solar and wind. Swapping personal vehicle trips for public transit rides, making your next car an electric vehicle, and shopping at thrift stores help cut down the production of heat-trapping pollution — and will save you money.

"Living shorelines are not the answer to save the coasts but they are a potential action toward reimagining future coastal resilience," Kocher concluded. "Relinquishing the ideal of a manicured waterfront is the start of embracing an alliance with the ecosystems we inhabit. Starting in backyards like Kelly's, there is an opportunity to recognize the value of wetlands and begin to dissolve the walls, physical and philosophical, built between humans and the sea."

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