INTRODUCTION The Hampton Roads region is located in southeastern Virginia where the Chesapeake Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean. The region includes seventeen municipal governments and has a large federal government presence with 26 federal agencies represented (See Figure 1). The region has a population that exceeds 1.7 million and is home to the deepest water harbor on the U.S. East Coast. Hampton Roads' economy is dependent on the local waterways and houses the world's largest naval facility, the sixth largest containerized cargo complex and supports a thriving shipbuilding and repair industry as well as a tourism industry. However, the region's vast coastline also contributes to its vulnerability from climate change. Hampton Roads is experiencing sea level rise at twice the global rate with regional projections in the January 2017 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report, Global and Regional Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States, of 1.9 feet of sea level rise at the low end and 11.5 feet of sea level rise under the most extreme case between 2000 and 2100 (NOAA, 2017). Planning for adaptation to sea level rise requires regional partnerships and strategies, especially for watersheds that cross municipal boundaries. While many of the municipalities in the region are forward thinking in their approaches to sea level rise, there is not a regional plan for adaptation and current federal funding models do not support analysis of and planning for sea level rise impacts on a regional scale. For coastal communities to be successful in sea level rise adaptation, there has to be a national understanding that water knows no borders and only collaborative problem-solving approaches that cross municipal boundaries will move regions toward adaptation. Functional boundaries of ecosystems or watersheds need to be the focus of adaptation rather than political boundaries of local, state, and federal entities. Coordination and collaboration between entities is the only way to achieve optimal outcomes.
The nineteenth-century experiences of yellow fever epidemics in New Orleans and Norfolk present historical parallels for how those cities, and others, are experiencing existential threats from climate change and sea level rise in the twenty-first century. In particular, the nineteenth-century “sanitary reform” movement can be interpreted as a model for challenges facing twenty-first-century “climate resilience” initiatives, including denialism and political obfuscation of scientific debates as well as tensions between short-term profit and the cost of long-term infrastructure investments and between individualism and communitarianism. The history of sanitary reform suggests that, at least in the United States, climate resilience initiatives will advance largely on a regional basis through extended local debates around these and other challenges until resilient infrastructure and practices are taken for granted, much as sanitary waterworks and sewers are today.
In 2021, the Commonwealth of Virginia concurrently completed the first phase of a Coastal Resilience Master Plan (CRMP) to outline coastal flood hazards and launched a statewide Community Flood Preparedness Fund (CFPF) to jump-start flood resilience capacity building and project implementation. Both initiatives required extensive locality awareness and buy-in to be successful and, despite best efforts, engagement and outreach fell short. The two initiatives were geographically and financially disconnected, leaving localities in the coastal zone with little incentive to participate fully in the CRMP process and localities throughout the state looking for more information about the CFPF. Strategies to improve outreach and engagement and link the two initiatives could provide incentive for participation in both, as has occurred in other regions, as the agency responsible for both moves forward with state mandated planning and engagement. This paper explores lessons learned in Virginia and the potential of the CFPF to level the playing field by allowing lower-resourced, rural, and riverine communities to catch up with urban, coastal communities and become more competitive for funding to address flooding while also concurrently enhancing statewide and coastal resilience planning initiatives.
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