The political complexity of coastal flood risk reduction: lessons for climate adaptation public works in the U.S.

Abstract

Climate adaptation public works (hereafter, adaptation works) are engineered, structural infrastructure projects, initiated, designed, and implemented by governments, with the intention of reducing the economic and social burden of climate change. For example, rising sea levels (Sweet et al., 2017), expanding coastal development (Crossett et al., 2013;Neumann et al., 2015;Titus et al., 2009), and recent hurricane disasters have encouraged several U.S. cities to investigate strategies for managing coastal floods, including adaptation works such as levees, storm surge barriers and other megastructures (

Uncertainty and Bias in Global to Regional Scale Assessments of Current and Future Coastal Flood Risk

“…First, current adaptation practise is diverse, ranging from high flood hazard standards over cost‐benefit analysis to large adaptation deficits (Bisaro et al., 2020 ; McEvoy et al., 2021 ; Nicholls et al., 2019 ). Second, adaptation has been mostly reactive depending on the experience of an extreme sea‐level event (Rasmussen et al., 2021 ). Third, social conflicts often impede adaptation efforts and it is impossible to predict how this will evolve in the future (Hinkel et al., 2018 ).…”

Equity Metrics for Climate Adaptation in the Electricity Sector

“…These burdens might be short-or long-term, and in many cases, the siting of a project will impose these costs primarily or entirely on one community, while the benefits accrue to other communities. The negative perception of these projects (e.g., as unpleasant or even harmful to residents) can affect property values in those same communities (Rasmussen et al, 2021). Although it can be difficult to quantify the costs of these burdens in absolute terms (e.g., the cost of noise pollution), their allocation might be more straightforward.…”