Climate advocates are urging Delaware to step up its efforts to adapt to the effects of a changing climate as a national report says the United States as a whole needs to do more, and a federal bill cosponsored by U.S. Sen. Chris Coons calls for a unified national approach to resiliency.
State lawmakers are looking to the Carney administration for evidence that it is acting on last summer’s bill requiring Delaware to cut its carbon emissions to net-zero by the middle of the century. Supporters of the Climate Change Solutions Act await publication of the first implementation report for that law, which the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control is required to present to the General Assembly by Jan. 1 next year.
State Rep. Debra Heffernan (D., Brandywine Hundred), lead sponsor of the climate bill, HB 99, said the Jan. 1 report will explain how the state plans to achieve the emissions goals, and will guide lawmakers and other advocates on whether more measures are needed.
“We’re going to be looking at the data to see if we’re doing enough to mitigate climate change,” Heffernan said. “HB 99 by itself doesn’t help us mitigate climate change but it’s going to help us take further actions to help us meet the goals.” The new law gives legal heft to the Climate Action Plan, an executive action launched by the Carney administration in 2017.
According to AR Siders, a University of Delaware professor who focuses on adaptation to climate change, some Delaware officials understand that the massive effects of a changing climate will require commensurate responses such as road relocations or revised building codes but that no such measures have yet been agreed, let alone implemented.
For now, officials in the state’s Department of Transportation, for example, are talking about raising vulnerable roads a couple of inches to avoid flooding caused by sea-level rise or heavy storms – measures that Siders said won’t match what’s coming.
“They are starting to think that’s not going to be enough because if we are looking at six inches, a foot, or even more of sea level rise, or what happens if and when we are hit by a major storm, we might need to do something much bigger,” she said.
The pressure for quicker, stronger action on climate change is reflected by last month’s National Climate Assessment, which highlighted flooding, sea-level rise, and the increasing development of flood-prone coastal areas among other effects felt especially by low-lying Delaware.
The report forecast 11 inches of sea-level rise around the whole of the U.S. coast between 2020 and 2050; noted that the number of people living below the high-tide line plus three-feet of sea-level rise rose by as much as 18 percent to 2.2 million from 1990 to 2020, and warned of the permanent inundation of infrastructure in some coastal areas.
Paying for massive adaptation such as the retreat of communities from flood-prone coastal areas, or the flood-proofing of roads, rail lines or sewer plants, will largely depend on government, the report said. But it noted that the private sector has begun to make its own investments in adaptation and mitigation.
In 2012, a report from Delaware’s Sea Level Rise Advisory Committee concluded that between 8 and 11 percent of Delaware’s land would be inundated if seas rise by 0.5 to 1.5 meters.
In 2017, the agency released forecasts for sea-level rise at the Delaware shore. They showed a rise of 0.72 feet (0.22 meters) under an intermediate scenario by 2030, and 1.31 feet (0.4 meters) by 2050 -compared with the sea level in 2000
DNREC said the 2012 report hasn’t been updated because the scenarios have not changed significantly, and the agency is focusing instead on “using the best-available data to plan at a smaller scale -- county, municipality or project-based,” said Michael Globetti, a spokesman.
Globetti said new climate-planning scenarios, including those for sea-level rise, will be issued in late 2024, and that work is currently underway in cooperation with the state climatologist.
The response to climate-driven disasters such as Superstorm Sandy in 2012 or Tropical Storm Ida in 2021 should be driven by a unified national policy led by a White House-level chief resilience officer, according to a bill sponsored by Sen. Coons and three other senators.
The bipartisan National Coordination on Adaptation and Resilience for Security Act, introduced in early November, noted that natural disasters such as hurricanes, flooding and wildfires cost the United States $225 billion each decade since 1980, rising to $165 billion in 2022 alone.
The federal response, spread over 17 agencies, is siloed and often duplicative, and should be consolidated, the bill says. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, each dollar invested in resilience saves about $6 spent on disaster response.
The bill called for a “whole-of-government effort” to build resilience against environmental vulnerabilities, as described in the National Climate Assessment.
“The question isn’t whether retreat will happen. The question is whether that retreat will be managed and supported and planned or whether it will be very reactive.”UD Climate Change Science and Policy Hub director A.R. Siders on why some people will have to leave their coastal communities due to the effects of climate change.
“With rising temperatures, prolonged drought and wildfire seasons, and more intense storms threatening communities across the U.S., we must do even more to prepare for extreme weather,” said the Environmental Defense Fund, a national nonprofit that supports the bill.
Despite the increased incidence of flooding in coastal areas, more people are building homes there, even after Superstorm Sandy devastated some coastal areas of the U.S. northeast in October 2012. A 2019 analysis by the research group Climate Central and the real estate firm Zillow found that about 14,000 Delaware homes built since 2010 were vulnerable to flooding at different levels depending on the extent to which global carbon emissions are controlled by international agreements. In Sussex County, the value of those homes totaled more than $5 billion.
Even if homes are elevated in flood-prone areas, that doesn’t account for infrastructure like roads and drains that will be underwater during storms or even normal high tides driven by rising seas, said UD’s Siders. She recalled an out-of-state coastal community where people rejected official calls to move away, and then lost one of their residents to a fatal heart attack when an ambulance couldn’t reach his house because roads were flooded.
“It’s heartbreaking but totally foreseeable that something like that might happen,” she said.
The answer is that some people will eventually have to leave their coastal communities because the land floods too often or simply becomes inundated.
“The question isn’t whether retreat will happen,” she said. “The question is whether that retreat will be managed and supported and planned or whether it will be very reactive.” She declined to say how many Delawareans might eventually be forced to move away from the coast, saying that the number would depend on the authorities’ willingness to build coastal defenses like bigger sand dunes.
Siders said she travels around Delaware, speaking about the effects of climate change to groups such as the Resilient and Sustainable Communities League and Sussex 2030, a community group that promotes “smart growth”.
She encourages people to consider the options, based on what they want their community to look like in future, but she’s not in the business of prescribing solutions. “More and more, people realize that something needs to be done,” she said.
From communities to state agencies, Siders said Delawareans are starting to recognize that it may no longer be enough to respond to heat waves by turning a local library into a cooling center, for example. A less reactive and more effective response would be to change building codes to be more energy efficient, allowing people to stay in their homes on hot days.
But such changes are very expensive, and require the buy-in of many different people, which is hard to achieve, she said.
“It requires a lot of actors to get on board and agree with what the plan is, and how it’s going to be funded and implemented,” she said. “As a country, we are still at the stage of trying to build momentum.”
For her part, Rep. Heffernan noted that Delaware cut carbon emissions by 27 percent between 2005 and 2018, and is on the way to hitting its emissions-reduction targets by 2030 and 2050. “I believe that Delaware is very close to being on track to hitting our 50 percent reduction target by 2030,” she said.
By contrast, national greenhouse gas emissions dropped by only 1 percent a year from 2005 to 2019 compared with a 6 percent annual reduction that is needed for the country to hit net-zero by 2050, according to the National Climate Assessment.
Still, Heffernan echoed the Assessment’s view that private capital is beginning to invest in climate adaptation and mitigation. She noted that business groups including the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce contributed to discussions over the climate bill, and helped to ensure its resounding approval in the legislature.
“Delaware is the lowest-lying state, therefore we have to take climate change and sea-level rise extremely seriously,” she said. “The actions we are taking, we are hoping to decrease the impact of climate change and sea-level rise. We are all going to need to be partners and work together if we are going to mitigate the dangers of climate change.”
