Virginia making progress on sea level rise
The King Tide effort uses Wetlands Watch’s mapping app to collect flood data, which is sent to VIMS to perfect their tide prediction system
Every fall, with the moon closest to the Earth, Virginia experiences its highest tides of the year. These so-called “King Tides,” show us where tomorrow’s water will be on a normal day.
Every fall for the last four years, hundreds of citizen scientists have turned out to map the flooding caused by those tides, as they did in mid-October this year.
Former Virginian-Pilot reporter Dave Mayfield thought up this “Catch the King Tides” project as a way to organize a group of tide mappers intent on catching the King Tide on this highest predicted tidal surge of the year. That community of mappers has grown and spread across Virginia’s coastal region, stretching from Lewisetta to Sandbridge.
The King Tide effort uses Wetlands Watch’s smartphone mapping app to collect flood data, which is then sent to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science to perfect their tide prediction system. This King Tide project is also creating a community of people who, through their collective action, are working to solve Virginia’s flooding problems.
This year the commonwealth of Virginia joined the King Tide community as another partner in this collective effort, following in the footsteps of the flood mappers to address sea level rise.
After years of dithering, in 2020 Virginia took actions that put us at the front of the pack of states dealing with coastal flooding. In the last General Assembly session alone, Virginia passed legislation not seen in other coastal states.
We now have a law that requires sea level rise to be considered in our tidal wetlands regulations as well as in the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act, which protects the shoreline buffers behind the wetlands. We added climate change to the mission of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and told them to review every program and regulation to meet that mandate.
Most importantly, new legislation has Virginia joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a market-based compact among the New England and Mid-Atlantic states to reduce CO2 emissions. The auction of CO2 allowances generates funding, 45% of which will be allocated in Virginia for the newly reconstituted Community Flood Preparedness Fund. Estimated revenues for this fund run to $40 million annually.
Then in late October, Gov. Ralph Northam came to Norfolk to announce the release of a coastal resilience planning framework, the strategic blueprint for pulling all of this together. Until now, Virginia has had the highest rate of sea level rise on the east coast but no plan for dealing with it. This blueprint will be used to develop a detailed coastal master plan next year that will help guide the millions of dollars in the new flood fund and will redirect state agencies to assist communities in fixing their flood woes.
Local governments are eager partners in this state push, having worked on their own to take steps to protect their citizens. Hampton, Norfolk, Portsmouth and Virginia Beach have city resilience strategies that are among the best in the country. Virginia’s Coastal Zone Management Program is investing nearly $100,000 over the next three years to bring the rest of tidewater’s localities’ plans along.
Virginia Beach is taking bold steps on stormwater and land use to deal with sea level rise and increased rainfall flooding. Norfolk has a new zoning ordinance focused on resilience and other cities will follow suit. And the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission is working on a sweeping set of suggested policies to address flooding in our region.
In one annual tide cycle, from last year’s King Tide event to this one, Virginia has moved to aggressively address our flooding challenges. We now have funding, a strategy and a strong advocacy network that reaches from our street-level mappers, through local and regional governments, to the governor’s office.
While we celebrate these efforts, we must also put them in context. The impacts from a relentless acceleration in rates of sea level rise and more intense rainfall are just now becoming apparent.
Wetlands Watch’s unscientific guess as to costs identified in coastal Virginia runs to $40 billion. Fixes for federal and state facilities are not included, nor are estimates of what the private sector will need for their shoreline operations.
As we close in on dealing with impacts from the King Tide, we have just cause for celebration. At the same time, we must prepare ourselves for the harder work ahead.
Skip Stiles