Efforts to protect coasts face cuts

WASHINGTON — A proposed White House budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration could put coastal communities throughout the nation at a major disadvantage as they struggle to adapt to threats from sea-level rise, severe storms and other climate-related events, scientists and other experts said.

That’s because the budget, revealed by The Washington Post last week, targets a handful of programs that provide important resources to help coastal states prepare for the coming effects of climate change.

The programs in the crosshairs include NOAA’s Coastal Zone Management grants and Regional Coastal Resilience grants, which come to $75 million combined, according to the document; its $10 million in Coastal Ecosystem Resiliency grants; the National Estuarine Research Reserve System, an annual investment of about $23 million; and its $73 million Sea Grant program.

At a federal advisory committee meeting in Bethesda, Md., on Tuesday, the acting administrator of NOAA, Benjamin Friedman, did not dispute The Post’s reporting on the proposed budget, although he cautioned that the cuts were only proposed.

“Let me just say that this is really preliminary information that is out there, this is part of the normal kind of budget deliberations that are ongoing; nothing is final,” Friedman said.

In the meantime, however, the proposed coastal cuts have a lot in common. These are grants and programs that lie at the intersection of oceans, the coast and a changing climate. Experts think the proposed cuts would not only disarm U.S. coasts in the face of warming and rising seas and the growing storm threats that come with them, but that they would disadvantage coastal states, including many states that voted for Trump, in dealing with threats they’re likely to face.

“Most people live near coastlines in our country and around the world, and need to be able to support their economy — and to try to prevent again the kind of devastation that we saw in Katrina and other storms,” said Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center.

To see how the proposed NOAA cuts disadvantage coasts and coastal communities, take the proposed cuts to the Coastal Zone Management grants. These grants are part of a partnership between the federal government and coastal states, including those bordering the Great Lakes, under the federal Coastal Zone Management Act.

“In many cases it’s local governments or state governments that have the responsibility, and most — especially the local governments — don’t have the wealth of information that the federal government does, and they don’t have immediate access to experts or resources to do a lot of the planning that they need to do,” said Jane Lubchenco, an environmental scientist at Oregon State University and former NOAA administrator under President Barack Obama. “So through the Coastal Zone Management grants, a lot of that information and expertise is made available to them.”

Also on the chopping block are Regional Coastal Resilience grants, which deal more specifically with bracing communities for adverse climate and weather events. These programs “build resilience of coastal communities to the negative impacts from extreme weather events, climate hazards, and changing ocean conditions,” according to a recent NOAA presentation.