Bipartisan group discusses threat of rising sea levels in Hampton Roads
NORFOLK The often shrill political debate over climate change yielded Monday to consensus about the threat facing Hampton Roads – and its critical military installations – from rising sea levels on a sinking coastal plain.
Sen. Timothy M. Kaine, D-Va., and three members of the state’s congressional delegation – two Republicans and a Democrat – joined local and regional officials in what Virginia Beach Mayor William D. Sessoms Jr. called a “call for action” to prepare a region of waterways for the likelihood that sea levels will rise at least a foot in 30 years.
“This is not a future thing in Hampton Roads – it’s happening now,” Kaine said at “Rising to the Challenge,” a conference on sea level rise held at Old Dominion University, which is leading a national pilot project on the issue.
Rising sea levels pose an increasing threat to low-lying Hampton Roads, home to nearly 2 million people, waterfront homes, military bases, popular beaches and ecologically valuable marshes.
The conference has been in the planning stages since soon after Kaine took office 18 months ago, but the timing was auspicious with the release of a Defense Department report on threats to military installations in Virginia, California and Alaska, and the creation today of a new state commission on the issue.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe will name members of his previously announced climate-change commission at First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach. The panel will focus on adapting to the effects of climate change, including rising seas.
“This discussion is rising to the very top now,” said Norfolk Mayor Paul Fraim, who said his city has been facing “higher tides and more forceful storm events” because of the rising sea levels and sinking land.
The concern was shared by elected officials of both parties, in Congress and the Virginia General Assembly, who agreed that better coordination of scientific data and public policy analysis is essential at the federal, state, regional and local levels.
“The challenge is not theoretical,” said Rep Scott Rigell, R-2nd, who appeared with Rep. Robert J. Wittman, R-1st, and Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott, D-3rd.
Kaine called the bipartisan consensus critical to the forum, which drew an estimated 300 people. “It only worked if I could get Democrats and Republicans to do it together,” he said in an interview.
For thousands of years, the sea level in Virginia went up about a foot a century. That rate increased during the 20th century, and waters are rising now at about a 2-feet-a-century clip, experts say. Some scientists say there’s evidence that sea levels will rise faster and faster in coming decades.
If current trends hold, scientists project Virginia’s waters could go up an additional 1.5 feet in 20 to 50 years and 5 feet or more by 2100.
These increasing rates of sea-level rise are at least partly due to man-made global warming, scientists say. When waters warm, they expand. Also, warming melts ice on land in places like Greenland.
In Virginia, sea levels are rising faster than the global average because the land is sinking, primarily from natural causes.
“This is a matter of national security… It’s a mission readiness issue,” said Alice Hill, senior adviser for preparedness and resilience at the National Security Council, who participated in one of two panel discussions at Monday’s conference.
It also could be a serious economic issue for Hampton Roads and the state, which already feel the effects of cutbacks in federal military spending because of political budget battles in Washington.
Just as encroaching residential development threatened the move of Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, “you can’t help but think of flooding problems as a form of encroachment,” said John Conger, deputy undersecretary of defense. “How does it affect your mission?”
Rising sea levels also have begun to affect a wide range of public policy decisions, from the pending federal transportation reauthorization act to the housing, planning and zoning policies at the state and local levels.
“There has to be a coordinated federal, state and local effort to accomplish this,” said Del. Christopher P. Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, who teamed this year with Sen. Mamie E. Locke, D-Hampton, on a resolution to create a joint legislative study committee on recurrent flooding.
The key to coordination may be ODU, which is launching the national sea level project, a pilot that will attempt to coordinate the work of 18 federal agencies, as well as efforts by the state and region, to quantify the potential rise in sea level and plan ways to deal with it.
“It’s strategic planning,” said retired U.S. Navy Capt. Ray Toll, the liaison between ODU and the Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the leader of the pilot project.
Looming over these efforts is concern about the cost to adapt the region to the reality of rising sea levels.
“The cost is just unbelievable,” said Sessoms, who then asked, “What is the cost if we do nothing?”
There are several options for dealing with the rising seas and the consequent flooding. They include building levees around valuable areas, discouraging coastal development, creating marshes that absorb floodwaters and raising buildings and roads.
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