This is the sixth and final installment in a series on making the North Carolina coast more resilient to the effects of climate change, a special reporting project that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines initiative.

There’s a growing body of evidence on what a warmer, wetter climate holds in store for our generation and future North Carolinians.

Among the effects already being felt and already baked in for decades ahead are more frequent heavy rains and, with them, repeated flooding in vulnerable areas.

The threat of greater flooding extends to every corner of the state. Eastern North Carolina comes to mind quickest because of the stunning disasters here. But intense rain events are happening in the west as well in places like Asheville, which has seen a series of floods over the past decade.

Although most of the state’s cities and towns have been expanding their stormwater requirements and capabilities over the past few decades, none are engineered to deal with a deluge.

In the state’s farmlands, the effect of heavy rains extends beyond direct damage to crops. Floods delay planting and harvesting, strand livestock and leave fields inaccessible.

The devastation wrought by Hurricane Matthew and Hurricane Florence brought about major changes in the way the state handles long and short-term disaster response. The one-two punch of 500-year storms that struck less than two years apart washed away doubts about the risks ahead. Even though climate science is not universally embraced in North Carolina, a changing climate is evident. Strategies for dealing with it are changing, too.

After Florence in 2018 churned through many of the same places as Matthew did in 2016, taking on disasters one at a time no longer made sense. Resiliency went from buzzword to watchword.

Gov. Roy Cooper and legislative leaders, often at odds, agreed to form a new state agency, the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, to handle both the massive inflow of federal disaster and housing aid, but also to find ways to best fit that aid into a resilience framework.

Getting proactive about flooding in the same way has not been so straightforward, in part because the impacts vary with every turn of the waterways, but mostly because of the enormous expense of raising roads, reconfiguring bridges and culverts and moving people and key infrastructure out of the floodplain.

Although there’s consensus across political and ideological lines, turning consensus into action has proven difficult, especially in an era of political polarization and a deadly pandemic.

This year, as the North Carolina General Assembly and the governor begin another fresh attempt to reach a deal on a comprehensive state budget, there’s early agreement on the need for a major effort on flooding resilience.

In his budget proposal last month, Cooper targeted $56 million for flood resilience programs and additional floodplain buyouts, along with a substantial increase for land conservation and stormwater infrastructure.

This week, a state Senate committee charged with working on major flood resilience and mitigation legislation holds its initial hearings.

Although there are differences among approaches and strategies between policy makers and stakeholders, one key theme that’s emerging in resilience and any likely legislation is an emphasis on leveraging the state’s land resources, particularly the vast areas of natural and working lands in eastern North Carolina.

The proposals come at a time when climate researchers say it is even more essential to preserve and enhance those lands because of a growing understanding of how essential they are to carbon sequestration and mitigating the state’s contribution to greenhouse gasses.

Both approaches envision converting some cropland back to forests and using farmlands, wetlands and other natural systems to reduce the severity of flooding.

As the state grapples with what to do about storms and floods to come, the nexus of resilience and sequestration found in its natural and working lands could become the cornerstone of North Carolina climate policy.

Off the charts

Last June, a working group made up of dozens of scientists, state and local officials and representatives of businesses and nonprofits published a 124-page appendix to the state’s 2020 Climate Risk Assessment and Resiliency Plan on the potential for working and natural lands.

Misty Buchanan, director of the state’s Natural Heritage Program and part of the working group that wrote the report, said that driving the push for putting natural solutions to work were findings in the state’s 2017 greenhouse gas emissions study, which revealed the scale of sequestration potential in natural and working lands.

“What drew me in, and what I think resonates with people, is when we got our greenhouse gas inventory and first started to understand where our emissions are coming from and how much our emissions are,” she said. “We determined that the land use sector, including natural areas and forest and farms and even things like oyster farms, have a huge potential to offset the emissions that are coming from the state.”

The study found that natural and working lands offset 25% of the state’s current greenhouse gas emissions, she said, more than twice the average rate of other states.

“We’re already in a great position,” Buchanan said. “We can do more. We also need to think about how we’re just going to hold on to that percentage as our state develops around us. We need to think about how we can restore land and manage our land in a way that we can continue to offset those gas emissions and sequester and store more carbon each year.”

To jumpstart the ideas and to build support, the group looked at options that provided multiple benefits, keying in on those that benefited both carbon sequestration and resiliency as well as water quality and biodiversity.

They fall under three main categories: protecting land through conservation easements or acquisition and incentives for protection; restoring lands to increase sequestration and resilience; and improving management of existing natural and working lands.

Proposals include programs for farmers to conserve and enhance lands, tools for local governments, changes to forest policies, tax incentives for landowners, further floodplain buyouts, preserving forests, restoring pocosin and coastal habitats, and improving urban land management.

Buchanan said that in assessing the opportunities, there were obvious win-wins. One that also gives an idea of the scale of the possibilities is that about 5% of the unprotected forests in the state are in the floodplain of watersheds with significant sources of pollution.

“If we just protected those forests, that would be a million acres,” she said. “So, there are some large opportunities still in North Carolina for land protection.”

The goal is 1 million acres of floodplain protection and another million acres of wetland and floodplain restoration. If that sounds like too much to shoot for, Buchanan said, consider that the Biden administration recently set far higher goals for land protection than that.

Scaling up resilience

Near the end of last year’s session, the General Assembly approved legislation to create an inventory of natural and working lands that could be used in flood control and potential incentives for private landowners to do stream restoration and wetlands enhancement and build flood-stage capacity. The bill set the stage for this year’s likely follow on.

The Senate Select Committee on Storm Related River Debris and Damage in North Carolina was set to meet for the first time Tuesday to review preliminary results from last year’s bill. The meeting was set for 10 a.m. in the Auditorium of the Legislative Building.

The committee is co-chaired by Sens. Danny Britt, R-Robeson, and Jim Perry, R-Lenoir, who represent eastern North Carolina counties hard hit by prolonged flooding during Matthew and Florence.

Earlier this month, the two announced that they were working on comprehensive flood resilience and mitigation legislation and holding a series of information sessions over the next several weeks, gathering input and reports from stakeholders and state agencies.

Perry said he and Britt believe that the state’s approach right now is too scattered and their primary goal is to focus it by establishing a sole, central agency in charge of enacting a statewide plan. In effect, Perry said in a recent interview, the state needs a flood czar.

“We think at the end of the day, somebody in the state of North Carolina needs to go to bed thinking about flooding mitigation and resiliency and needs to wake up thinking about it,” he said. The state can’t settle for a patchwork approach or sweeping problems under the rug.

Perry is among those advocating for large-scale debris removal as part of the plan as well. He said he’ll listen to the scientists in terms of best practices, but he doesn’t want a here-and-there approach.

“We don’t need to clean out the spots of river, close to the bridge because people can see it. We need to start somewhere around Raleigh and clean it out all the way down to the coast,” he said.

The whole approach to dealing with flooding has to be that way, he said.

“We got to do it right, we’ve got to be committed. And you have to have someone who has ownership who can coordinate with all these agencies who can help prioritize which thing comes next and what’s the next step.”

In addition to the state commitment, there’s an unprecedented wave of federal funding for resiliency and sequestration programs. There’s also another avenue of support expected should Congress approve an infrastructure package.

With so much money on the table and other states providing a blueprint for drawing down federal dollars for large-scale resilience programs, there is a profound sense of urgency in Raleigh to coalesce around a strategy.

Perry said states like Louisiana and Iowa have shown that having a plan opens a lot more opportunities for federal support. The state needs that, he said, if it’s going to do anything on a scale that will make a difference.

“You look at what they’ve done in Louisiana. They’re getting a $1.2 billion federal grant, because they had a great plan,” he said. “They had a great resiliency plan that could change the lives of the people there.”

Perry and Britt’s committee isn’t the only group in the legislature looking at scaling up resilience.

Late last month, a joint meeting of the House and Senate Appropriations Committee on Agriculture and Natural and Economic Resources met with officials from Resource Environmental Solutions, a Louisiana-based contractor for stream restoration and large-scale natural solutions work. The company recently acquired a North Carolina-based company and told the committee they were ready to ramp up work in the state.

Committee co-chair Rep. Pat McElraft, R-Carteret, told committee members the state would have to look to the private sector in order move quickly on bigger projects.

Broad buy-in

Although the exact policies and the dollars involved in making it work are still a work in progress, the moves by both the administration and the legislature to incorporate a natural and working lands strategy are drawing support.

Todd Miller, executive director of the North Carolina Coastal Federation and a presenter at Tuesday’s Senate committee hearing, told Coastal Review the bills so far are going in the right direction.

“The bills that have been introduced in the Senate and House are very welcome and show a lot of potential for the state making huge gains in using nature-based strategies to reduce future losses from flooding,” Miller said. “The emphasis on the need to develop a volume-based watershed management framework and empower local communities to strategically invest in reducing floods is very encouraging.”

North Carolina Farm Bureau Natural Resources Director Keith Larick said involving farmers in solutions around flooding, resilience and climate-related issues is a growing trend nationwide.

Larick, who has been gathering feedback from farmers on some of the potential flood-mitigation ideas, said most recognize that they’re likely to play a role in the solutions and they’re willing to listen.

“When we talk to farmers there’s a recognition that the types of practices that are being talked about are going to go on working lands, whether it’s forestry, whether it’s ag land, pasture or cropland. That’s where the space is to put these kinds of practices on the ground,” he said.

If the state can come up with a fair system that allows a farmer to agree to conserve land or open a field to floodwaters to take pressure off downstream, there’ll be buy-in, Larick said.

“For a long time, farmers have operated in the world of voluntary programs, voluntary incentives for conservation practices,” he said. “The flood-mitigation side of it is new but it’s an easy connection to make for a lot of folks.”

It’s obvious that farmers in North Carolina, especially those in the east, have been dealt a harsh blow by the major storm hurricanes, Larick said, but they’re also seeing other climate impacts. More frequent heavy downpours with flash flooding are happening in the spring and summer. This year was yet another wet winter that kept some farmers out of the fields. Farmers farthest east are dealing with saltwater intrusion or fouling of groundwater supplies associated with sea level rise.

“There’s been a growing recognition we’re having these issues that are climate related,” he said. “There’s the broader discussion, ‘what are we going to do about climate change?’ but we also have the immediate issue of what are we going to do to mitigate the kind of things that we’re already seeing?”

Larick said he also sees the potential dual role for farmland for flood mitigation and carbon sequestration, which is gaining traction among agriculture interests at the national level.

It makes sense, but the question is whether stakeholders and policy makers can come up with system that works, Larick said.

“The flood mitigation really isn’t the concern at the national level, they’re looking at carbon sequestration, but you know when I see that I’m also thinking in the back of my head ‘OK, there are other benefits here, too. Can we tie all this together somehow?’”

This is the fifth installment in a continuing series on making the North Carolina coast more resilient to the effects of climate change, a special reporting project that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines initiative.

Twenty-five coastal communities will have money from the state to better prepare for natural hazards.

The funding is geared to drive better-informed decision making at the local level and initiatives that reduce risk and vulnerability to flooding, storms and other effects of climate change.

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal Management announced March 17 a total of $675,000 would be granted through the new Resilient Coastal Communities Program, launched in the fall to provide technical and financial help to governments in the state’s 20 coastal counties to develop resilience efforts. The application deadline was Jan. 15.

“We wish we had the funding to have accepted all interested communities into the program, but we hope to secure additional funding to offer another round of Phase 1 and 2 funding in the future,” Sam Burdick, coastal resilience coordinator with the Division of Coastal Management, recently told Coastal Review. The division received 30 applications representing 32 coastal communities  — one application was submitted by three communities — for the first two phases of grant funding.

“Building resilience to natural hazards is vital for communities to help maintain quality of life, healthy growth, durable systems, and conservation of resources for present and future generations,” Burdick explained. “However, a number of barriers to developing resilience to coastal risks exist, including economic and capacity constraints that have been exacerbated in recent times. Building more resilient communities requires careful, thorough planning efforts using sound, locally relevant data.”

Burdick is from Duck on the Outer Banks and has a background in coastal science, policy, ecology, local and regional planning, and community outreach. Before joining the division, Burdick was the community planner and disaster recovery coordinator for the Eastern Carolina Council of Governments. She has been the coastal resilience coordinator with the division in Morehead City since February 2020 and is tasked with leading the development and implementation of the Resilient Coastal Communities Program.

The program is rolling out in four phases: community engagement and risk and vulnerability assessment; planning, project selection and prioritization; project engineering and design; and implementation. The initial funds are to be used for the first two phases.

Community applications were scored across seven criteria, including the level of risk exposure to vulnerable populations and critical assets, economic status and need, and internal capacity and momentum with related efforts, according to the state.

The towns of Aurora, Beaufort, Belhaven, Cape Carteret, Hertford, Leland, Navassa, Sunset Beach, Surf City, Topsail Beach, North Topsail Beach, Vandemere, Washington and Windsor are to receive technical assistance to complete Phases 1 and 2.

Barnes Sutton, town planner in Navassa in Brunswick County, explained Tuesday that urban planning and design were once guided by the natural forces in a given area, such as navigable waters or the direction of prevailing winds, allowing cities to optimize those natural resources and by extension protect those resources.

“This created unique places that balanced city centers and residential areas with communal space and fields for agriculture,” Sutton said. He added that at some point, urban planning moved away from these principles and began to emphasize consumption over conservation.

“Being selected to participate in the Resilient Coastal Communities Program underlines the importance of natural resources and how to grow with sustainability and recyclability in the forefront, which in time, can undo the damages over-consumption has done,” Sutton said. “Navassa is poised to support exponential growth in residential, commercial and recreational sectors over the next five years, all of which will need healthy and efficient waterways to support it and will only be magnified by the restoration and protection of them.”

Beaufort in Carteret County also received a grant. Town Planner Kate Allen told Coastal Review Tuesday that storm surge and the heavy rainstorms and higher tides of recent years pose acute risks to life and property, particularly during hurricane season.

“In 2018, Hurricane Florence wreaked havoc on the town and surrounding areas. Heavy rains coupled with high tide results in frequent flooding of Front Street. Shoreline erosion, primarily caused by rising water levels and storms, increases the town’s flooding risk. These stressors individually pose risk, but are most impactful when they occur together, and often they do,” she said. “As a small community, town staff lack the time necessary to conduct thorough vulnerability and risk assessments. This grant will allow the town to place more emphasis on the risk and vulnerability assessment included in the ongoing CAMA/Comprehensive Land Use Plan update.”

The division also selected the counties of Beaufort, Craven, Currituck, Dare for Hatteras Island, Hertford, Hyde and Pamlico for the program.

Dare County Manager Bobby Outten said Tuesday that the county received a $30,000 grant through the program to study all risks and vulnerabilities on Hatteras Island. These include economic vulnerabilities, storm vulnerabilities, transportation vulnerabilities and any others that the consultant determines exist.

“Completion of this study would make Dare County eligible for additional grants to determine remedies to resolve or mitigate the vulnerabilities found,” Outten said. “Once the remedies are determined, Dare County would be eligible for yet another grant to begin implementing those remedies.”

Duck, Nags Head, Swansboro and Pine Knoll Shores have shown significant momentum in resilience planning and have been selected to complete the remaining requirements of the first two phases, the division said in the March 17 announcement.

Burdick said big barriers for communities when it comes to planning is the lack of a dedicated resilience budget, an overall reduced budget related to the economic effects of the pandemic, and a lack of capacity to plan.

A more proactive, sustainable and equitable approach to risk planning focuses on mitigating or reducing vulnerability, rather than responding after storms or flooding, she said.

The resilience program is a priority in the state’s Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan and reflects Gov. Roy Cooper’s commitment to building climate change resiliency statewide while promoting economic growth and stability. It’s the product of a series of resilience efforts and events the division led in recent years to address intensifying natural hazards on the coast, Burdick said.

The division worked with five local governments from 2017 to 2018 using a process called Resilience Evaluation Needs Assessment, or RENA, to map critical assets and assess risk and vulnerability to coastal hazards.

After Hurricane Florence in 2018, Cooper signed Executive Order No. 80, calling for the development of the North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan. The state held several workshops in 2019, including in Elizabeth City and Wilmington, to ensure the plan was based on local knowledge and needs, she said.

The 2020 Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan called for the development of the Resilient Communities Program, which was designed to boost resilience building at the local level with a three-pronged approach: local government funding, training and capacity building and an online resilience portal. The Resilient Coastal Communities Program falls under the larger umbrella of the statewide North Carolina Resilient Communities Program, Burdick explained.

The division received about $830,000 in funding from the North Carolina General Assembly and $1.1 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation this year to begin developing and implementing the resilience framework for local governments.

Partnering with the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, North Carolina Sea Grant and The Nature Conservancy, the division tailored a number of resilience plans from other states to needs specific to coastal North Carolina communities.

Division Director Braxton Davis said division partners and coastal communities have been working on various aspects of coastal resilience for a long time, but lacked a clear framework to help organize efforts.

“This new program will help all of us become more efficient and strategic in our investments, ensure that we are identifying and prioritizing the most important projects, and provide more targeted technical assistance that builds on previous planning efforts,” Davis said. “DCM is proud to lead this effort on behalf of our coastal communities and appreciates the ongoing partnerships we have with the N.C. Office of Recovery and Resiliency, The Nature Conservancy, and N.C. Sea Grant.”

The resilience team held two interactive webinars in August 2020 to introduce the Resilient Coastal Communities Program and the funding opportunities targeted to local governments, consultants, academia and nongovernmental organizations. A total of 225 attendees participated in these webinars, including representation from 18 county governments and 39 municipal governments.

A virtual discussion with more than 50 contractors interested in providing services to communities through this program was held in September 2020. There were 24 contractor applications for Phases 1 and 2.

“Understanding the importance of inclusivity and equity in planning processes, participating local governments and contractors will develop a Community Action Team, or steering committee, and a community engagement strategy to involve community members and local leaders throughout the process,” Burdick said. “Local knowledge and feedback are key and will help inform the process and drive the development of sound, feasible projects and action items to enhance resilience.”

Next in the series: Natural and working lands

This is the fourth installment in a continuing series on making the North Carolina coast more resilient to the effects of climate change, a special reporting project that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines initiative.

The treehouses were an early sign that Windsor, Bertie’s county seat, was onto something. When there’s a river running right through your town, resilience requires finding creative ways to coexist with the river.

“It’s a source of flooding, but it’s also a source of recreation,” County Commissioner Ron Wesson said of the Cashie River.

So, five years ago, the town took the boring concept of flood adaptation and made it fun — and a revenue-producing tourist attraction. Accessible via an elevated boardwalk, two treehouses were built among the cypress canopy along the river, each with a sleeping loft and basic furnishings, with a shared bathroom facility available nearby.

Now there’s a “village” of three of the rugged cabins, elevated safely — and irresistibly — above the water. They’re so popular, with weekend bookings filled straight through the summer, that the town is proposing to add two more.

“Two of them have trees coming through the middle of them,” Wesson said in a recent interview.

Canoes and platforms are also available to rent for “glampers,” or those who enjoy glamorous camping, rounding out offerings for the region’s nascent ecotourism industry.

Positioned in the center of the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system, Bertie County — specifically, Windsor — in the last two decades has suffered some of the worst repeated flooding disasters in inland northeastern North Carolina, an area increasingly beset by changing climate impacts such as flooding from rising sea levels and intense rains.

In 1999, downtown Windsor was inundated with more than 6 feet of floodwater during Hurricane Floyd, destroying dozens of homes, businesses and public buildings. It flooded dramatically again in 2016 during Hurricane Julia. Then, just three weeks later, Hurricane Matthew drove 7 feet of water into the town, destroying nearly 40 homes and numerous businesses.

The one-two punch in 2016 shook Bertie officials into realizing expert help was needed to forestall a future of constant flooding.

But after numerous scientists and engineers evaluated drainage and flooding dynamics in the Cashie River Basin, there were no easy answers.

“We have three major rivers that come together,” Wesson said. “When those rivers back up, it dumps that water into our communities, Windsor especially.”

Potential remedies, such as diverting water to retention ponds or spillways, he said, would help, although it would most likely only reduce the worst flooding instead of preventing it entirely. And although more buildings are being elevated on pilings, even that tactic is not failsafe or always possible.

Considering the billions in mitigation costs the town faces — or accept the loss of the community — town leaders are now making long-term plans to gradually relocate to higher ground.

“There is no real major solution,” Wesson conceded.

On March 17, Windsor was one of 25 communities to be awarded a total of $675,000 in funding through the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality Division of Coastal Management’s new Resilient Coastal Communities Program. The grant funds will go toward assessing the community risk and planning, selecting and prioritizing projects, as well as engagement of citizens in the process.

Windsor, however, is just one of numerous areas within the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary forced to contend with increased amounts and days of flooding. The estuarine system, the nation’s second-largest behind the Chesapeake, has 3,000 square miles of open water, encompasses six river basins and eight sounds — the Albemarle, Pamlico, Back, Bogue, Core, Croatan, Currituck and Roanoke — and spans from the central North Carolina coast to southeastern Virginia, according to the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuarine Partnership. It’s got enough total estuarine shoreline — 9,115 miles — and freshwater rivers and streams — 9,299 miles — to cross the country three times.

In 2006, there were 2.5 million acres of wetlands and 4.5 million acres of farmland recorded, although losses have been steadily occurring over the years since. And it has the largest amount of pocosin wetlands in the world.

To retired East Carolina University coastal geology professor Stan Riggs, the region needs to appreciate the ecotourism “golden goose” that exists in its rich natural resources: miles of quiet waters, hundreds of acres of swamp and forests filled with wildlife and star-lit dark skies unsullied by city lighting.

“People go on U.S. 64 and they go to the beach,” he said in a 2020 interview. “They never get off the highway.”

By promoting the region, its residents will find another approach to making a living with its land and water.

“This is a new resource out there. All of this used to be farming land and timberland,” Riggs said. “Alligator River — we ditched it and ditched it and ditched it. You can’t ditch it anymore because the seas are rising. Because of sea level rise that’s taken place since 1700 … it’s rising now more and more. That water comes up a little bit higher.

“Half of those counties are at sea level — it didn’t used to be that way,” he said. “We can’t farm them. We can’t log them anymore. So, let’s recreate with them!”

Riggs has worked closely with Bertie County officials in helping the community understand its flood risk. But as part of a nonprofit initiative that he chairs, the N.C. Land of Water — the focus is on the 17 counties in the northeast corner of the state, which have been hit with dual stresses of economic decline and environmental challenges from climate change.

“When I started here 55 years ago, there were working people out there on the water,” he recalled. “Everybody had a little boat, they’d go out on these black waters. Those waters are absolutely beautiful. All those streams that come into the Albemarle — awesome, awesome for kayaking. We can bring people from all over the world to paddle these waters.”

An early success in the NC LOW effort is an outdoor recreation project in Bertie called Tall Glass of Water, which recently opened the first public beach in all the Albemarle Sound communities.

But Riggs’ and NC LOW’s shared mission is one of a growing number of efforts to foster coastal resilience.

Reide Corbett, executive director of the multi-institutional Coastal Studies Institute in Wanchese and dean of the Integrated Coastal Program at ECU, has been providing data and, when possible, scientists to local communities to help them mitigate climate impacts.

“I think it’s critical that communities really start thinking about resilience,” he said recently. “Certainly, we need to think about changes we want to have in place after an event. The discussion about what that policy is has to happen before that event.”

But the first step is for a community to define what resilience means to the people there, he cautioned. Is it bouncing back from storm damage? Or is it being proactive about determining responsive options to the impacts of an event?

Being resilient is not simply putting a building back, he said.

“It involves the ecosystem, your economy, the biosphere,” Corbett said. “The concept of resilience needs to think about that interaction, that codependence and the economy that’s built. We have to frame that concept of resilience … That’s important to us, to educate the citizenry. That’s something that we need to do — sort of frame that concept. That’s something that’s done through education.”

Corbett said he is encouraged by Gov. Roy Cooper’s efforts to mitigate climate change impacts and the state’s recent outreach to communities to assist in their resilience planning.

“It’s going to take time to make significant changes,” he said. “We went years, essentially, with no science. We’ve come a long way since 2010.”

One effort that also involves the Coastal Studies Institute — among multiple other universities and agencies in the state and beyond — recently launched is C-Coast, which stands for the Collaboratory for Coastal Adaptation over Space and Time. A North Carolina-focused program funded by the National Science Foundation to address a range of challenges in coastal resilience, C-Coast is a network of coastal researchers, stakeholders and practitioners who collaborate on work that fosters better understanding of human interaction with the natural coastal system.

“We envision C-Coast having perhaps a core of participants,” said Laura Moore, professor of coastal geomorphology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the director of C-Coast. “But we also see C-Coast as a broad network.”

Even though its initial focus is on North Carolina, she added, the work that’s done will be useful to researchers and stakeholders from other regions.

C-Coast’s “theme,” Moore explained, is “connecting short term decision-making to long-term outcomes, and understanding what are the ways in which the connection between the short-term and long-term can be influenced by different actors in the process.”

As an example, Moore said, when a road is covered in sand during a storm, does removal of the sand — an island’s land — inadvertently weaken the long-term resilience of the island’s landscape?

“We aren’t looking to advocate for any particular outcome or particular future,” Moore said. “We’re looking to understand the decision process, how short-term decisions lead to long-term outcome.”

James “Bo” Dame, professor of biology and physical sciences at Chowan University in Murfreesboro, has involved students in research on water quality impacts, ideally as a way to answer specific questions, such as influences of water quality on submerged aquatic vegetation, or the health of frogs and toads.

Dame said that he is about to launch a water quality monitoring program this spring with his students near the Tall Glass of Water project on the Albemarle Sound in Bertie County.

Although the Chowan River, which empties into the northwest end of the Albemarle, in recent years has been plagued with algal blooms during the warm months, Dame said the problem happens closer to Edenton and has not been evident at the end where they’ll be working.

Their work won’t solve the Chowan’s algal issue, he said, but he hopes it will contribute to improving water quality in the area around the site.

Dame said he and the students will probably be sampling about a half-dozen locations on the northwest edge of the Albemarle Sound from Salmon Creek to the U.S. 17 bridge. Although specifics have yet to be decided, water quality monitoring could be looking at levels of phosphorus, salinity, dissolved oxygen, temperature, or clarity, turbidity chlorophyll, nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus.

Considering Bertie’s relatively small place in the vast and complex Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system, Dame said that its active role in resilience planning, economic adaptation and sustainable environmental restoration may be a positive contagion to other communities in the region.

The key to the appeal of Tall Glass of Water, which will include not just opportunities to camp and swim, but also to kayak, canoe and hike on trails, is the combination of environment, ecotourism and especially education, he said.

When Dame teaches his young adult students, he finds them receptive and open to climate issues, he said, but it’s still a battle with education and science literacy.

“This project feeds into that and it provides a perfect opportunity to make young people more aware of their environment, to get them out in the mud and whatever you find outdoors,” he said about Tall Glass of Water. “That’s usually when the lights go on. That’s when they get excited.”

This is the third installment in a continuing series on making the North Carolina coast more resilient to the effects of climate change, a special reporting project that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines initiative.

MERRY HILL — At the confluence of the Albemarle Sound and the Chowan River, Bertie County residents celebrated in June 2019 the grand opening of their first public beach.

Amid the joyous splashing and squeals of laughter, Ron Wesson spied a young girl trying to coax her little brother into the water. The boy would not budge, so the older man gently offered to help.

“We kind of sat there, with our toes in the water,” Wesson recounted in a recent interview. “He held my hand, and I walked out there with him. We took it real slow.”

Within a short time, the little guy found his nerve and was soon playing carefree in the water with the other kids.

Bertie Beach is the community’s first cool gulp of the “Tall Glass of Water,” the working name for the county’s outdoor recreational project.

“It’s weird, though, because I can kind of relate,” Wesson said, referring to the boy’s hesitation and that he and the boy are both Black.

In 2019, Bertie County was ranked by Wall St. 24/7 analysis as the poorest county in North Carolina. Of its population of 19,000 people, about 68% are Black. Wesson said that, historically, the county has the highest percentage of Blacks in the state.

But the experience that day transcended race, and its implications reverberated beyond Bertie County. The celebration was part of a strategic regional approach to community resilience: Bring the environment to the people and stimulate economic growth through sustainable ecotourism.

After devoting much of his career to study of North Carolina’s barrier islands and sea level rise impacts, Stanley Riggs, a professor emeritus at East Carolina University, has in recent years focused on the inland communities of the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system, which comprises sounds and rivers and is threatened by sea level rise and other climate change impacts. Those waterways and surrounding lands offer great opportunity but are considered vastly underutilized.

“That’s one of the world’s great water systems and it’s hardly used,” Riggs said in an interview late last year. “There’s nobody on Alligator River and the whole Albemarle Sound system. There’s precious few people out there.

“We’ve lost several generations of people. Kids have never learned to swim. You take people out on boats and they’re scared to death.”

Riggs is chairman of the North Carolina Land of Water initiative, or NC LOW, and Tall Glass of Water is one of its first success stories.

To Wesson, a county commissioner and Bertie native, the project’s multiyear effort shines new light on the county’s wealth of natural resources.

“It’s about broadening the opportunities and possibilities in a community,” he said. “You have to look at the resources available in a community. This is economic development. This is our brick and mortar.”

Perhaps more than any promotion or lecture could ever do, Tall Glass of Water is showing that climate resilience springs not only from a community’s shared investment in its environment, but also from its shared access to and benefits of that environment.

Its success demonstrates to the entire region that resilience and adaptation to changing climate conditions can enrich communities and open up new economic possibilities, while protecting their environments.

People from all over northeastern North Carolina attended the grand opening of Bertie Beach, said Steve Biggs, Bertie County’s director of economic development, in a recent interview. About 250 people were coming on summer weekends, he said. Swimming, kayaking, canoeing and paddleboarding are all allowed. Eventually, he said, he envisions families traveling to the Outer Banks stopping by for a respite in Bertie.

Biggs explained that the genesis of Tall Glass of Water, or TGOW, was in about 2014, when he was on the lookout for a piece of land for the county to build a boat ramp on the Chowan River. As he was heading into work one day, he said he noticed a “For Sale” sign on some waterfront property.

“I came in and jokingly told the commissioner who happened to be here that morning, ‘So I found your 2 acres for your boat ramp, but it comes with an additional 135 acres,’” Biggs said. As it ended up, the county purchased the 137 acres, he said, and added 10 more later.

Even though Phase I of the TGOW project was stalled by COVID-19 shutdowns, the public outdoor recreation plan has already injected a bolt of energy in talk of ecotourism collaboratives among Albemarle communities.

“We wanted to create a place where folks can spend the day,” now-retired Bertie County manager Scott Sauer said in an interview shortly before the June 29, 2019, opening day. “We think this will be a place that will draw people regionally.”

Not only does the project boast a 3/4-mile stretch of shoreline — 350 feet of which is sandy beach — and shallow, calm water bordered by soundside cliffs where the Chowan River begins, TGOW also includes opportunities for kayaking and canoeing, and will eventually offer a music pavilion, picnic shelters, hiking trails, ramps and walkways, primitive campsites and environmental educational field experiences for students and adults, according to plans. There will also be restoration of the former agricultural land and woodlands, which will help restore the wetlands.

Gov. Roy Cooper announced last September that the TGOW project would receive $500,000 through the North Carolina Parks and Recreation Trust Fund, which awarded $5 million total in grants to fund 16 local parks and recreation projects across the state.

Bertie County’s local match for Phase 1 is $529,591, for a total of $1,029,591.

The county-owned land encompasses Site Y, where archaeologists with the First Colony Foundation recently discovered artifacts that indicate some members of the 1587 Lost Colony relocated there after leaving Roanoke Island.

As luck would have it, a large area of adjacent wilderness was protected around the same time as TGOW was hatched. The new, more than 1,200-acre Salmon Creek State Natural Area was purchased for conservation by the nonprofit Coastal Land Trust, which turned it over to the state in 2019. Altogether, a total of 1,432 acres of undeveloped soundfront land is now protected.

Robin Payne, a project consultant for Tall Glass of Water, said that the citizens provided input into the master plan, which was released in March 2020. The project is being built and funded in phases.

“You know, it really all has to be sustainable, and it has to tie together community, environment and economic development,” she told Coastal Review Online last year. “And so, as we move forward, we’re making sure that we connect those three points.”

Until now, unless a family could go to a private pool or beach, it wasn’t a realistic option to enjoy a refreshing dip — especially for African Americans. There are still plenty of kids from Bertie who have never been to the ocean, Wesson said — the Outer Banks is about a 90-minute drive from Windsor.

Wesson, 70, was born and raised in Bertie County before leaving for college and beginning a 32-year career as a corporate executive in supply-management solutions with Dun and Bradstreet.

He returned home about 15 years ago, and he hasn’t forgotten what it feels like as Black kid who had never had the opportunity to swim or go to a beach. He said he didn’t get to swim until he persuaded his mother to take him at age 12 or so to a biracial pool in Rocky Mount, where one of the lifeguards informally taught him the basics of swimming.

“If you’ve never been in the water, other than a bathtub,” he said, “you’re not sure what’s going to happen to you.”

Bertie Beach is the first public access beach not only in the county, he said, but also along the entire Albemarle Sound. To this day, there is no public pool in the area.

Windsor, Bertie’s county seat, suffered extreme flooding from Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and Hurricane Matthew in 2016, but flooding overall has increased in recent years. That realization spurred residents to support efforts to make the town more resilient to flooding.

Biggs, the economic development director, said that more people are elevating their homes and businesses, but he said that, right now, there is not much state or federal help for small businesses. Still, with more people homebound as a result of the pandemic, he said, there is a lot more renovation being done, and the town is continuing to build back.

A farming community by tradition, many residents today work at the Perdue chicken processing plant or at the state correctional facility in Windsor, which houses medium- and maximum-security prisoners. Other folks raise chickens for Perdue or have jobs at Nucor Steel in adjacent Hertford County. The Hope Plantation is in Bertie County, but there are few other tourist attractions. At the same time, there are few chain stores and restaurants.

Bigg noted that more farmers and landowners in the county — as elsewhere in the region — are also leasing their land out for solar farms, which can produce steady income.

Inland coastal counties in North Carolina, especially in the rural northeast corner, are some of the poorest in the state, with losses in population and traditional industries such as timber, farming and fishing, leaving historic old towns with vacant storefronts and entire communities with too few good jobs.

Unlike the Outer Banks’ beach communities that benefit from a billion-dollar annual tourism industry, those communities in the “Inner Banks” — a relatively new term used to describe inland coastal counties —are often overlooked by visitors.

As part of NC LOW efforts, Riggs, the coastal scientist, in 2018 produced a report, “From Rivers to Sounds in the Bertie Water Crescent,” which detailed opportunities for economic development that enhances and protects the environment and culture of the region. That environment encompasses numerous rivers and tributaries with pristine, clear blackwater, filtered by the surrounding peat bogs and wetlands.

In a broader NC LOW report, recommendations include development of five educational and recreational “water hubs” for ecotourism development, with each plan designed for the unique qualities of each hub, but complementary to the whole system.

“All ecosystem components of these different water bodies and their vast swamp forest floodplains,” the report said, “are dominated by numerous forms of wildlife including a vast recreational fisheries resource.”

Within the last 15 years or so, an on-again, off-again proposal to connect the Albemarle port communities with a small ferry operation has been enthusiastically embraced by local governments for its appeal to tourists and as a potential bonanza for economic development. But for various reasons, the idea has never come to fruition. Still, it has never entirely died, and the idea may yet bear fruit.

“Every time anything about it happens, everybody gets excited: ‘When are the boats coming?’” state Rep. Ed Goodwin, R-Chowan, who was also a former director of the state ferry division, said in a recent interview. “I firmly believe that sooner or later, I’ll get it. I believe it will happen.”

A 2018 report “The Harbor Town Project,” a collaborative done by the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School, said that a ferry system serving the Albemarle Sound could “increase tourism and create sustainable jobs and careers” and “is an attractive investment opportunity that can become profitable.”

Ferries could serve ports in Elizabeth City, Edenton, Hertford, Plymouth, Columbia and Kitty Hawk, and possibly expand to Windsor, Williamston, Manns Harbor and Manteo, the report said. As many as 140,000 Outer Banks tourists, the report estimated, could be lured to extend their vacation to hop on Inner Banks ferries.

Potentially, the system could garner about $14 million in tourism revenue and create 94 jobs, with annual ridership projected to be 107,000 in the first year.

“Tourists and visitors would enjoy visiting historic towns and sites, seeing nature, and exploring the IBX region by ferry,” the report said, playing off the ubiquitous OBX abbreviation for Outer Banks.

According to news accounts, plans were being made for a 100-foot private passenger vessel to start ferrying passengers between six towns in May 2020. But with COVID-19 shutdowns in mid-March, everything having to do with tourism ground to a halt.

“Everybody is still enthusiastic and wants it done next week, even if it’s an expansion of the current ferry system,” Goodwin said, referring to the state Ferry Division system on the coast.

Goodwin said that he envisions developing routes that highlight the uniqueness of the Albemarle’s environment, while promoting the strength of the region’s rich culture.

“Everybody loves to ride a boat,” he said. “We’ve got to maximize what we have. And what we have is quaint little towns with a lot of history in them.”

Coastal Review Online Assistant Editor Jennifer Allen contributed to this report.

Next in the series: Learning to live with water

This is the second installment in a continuing series on making the North Carolina coast more resilient to the effects of climate change, a special reporting project that is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines initiative.

EASTERN NORTH CAROLINA — Craig Allen’s memory is a little hazy on the finer details of the coastal storm that pushed the waters of Scotts Creek into his grandmother’s backyard in James City.

He can’t pinpoint the precise year and time the hurricane rolled in – sometime in the early 1970s when he was in elementary school. He doesn’t recall the storm’s name.

But he vividly remembers that it was the first time in his life water flowed over the banks of Scotts Creek and crept alarmingly close to his grandmother’s house on Kennedy Drive.

“Every year since then it’s getting worse,” Allen said. “There’s some trees in the water now that when I was a kid they weren’t in the (Neuse) river.”

Allen also recalls that during Hurricane Florence in September 2018, residents had to be rescued by boat when Scotts Creek flooded the neighborhood.

James City, a community on the peninsula at the confluence of the Trent and Neuse rivers in Craven County, is in a floodplain.

That designation is part of why this community, which has a storied Black history, is one of several throughout North Carolina that has been identified by the state as a “potential” environmental justice community.

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, or NCDEQ, has created maps that identify potentially underserved populations, ones that meet certain racial and economic criteria.

The state’s June 2020 Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan identifies these communities as either having a population that consists of more than 50% nonwhites or a population of nonwhites of at least 10% higher than the county or state share. And, those with a population that experiences a poverty rate over 20% and households with poverty at least 5% higher than the county or state share.

The maps are designed to be a tool for local governments and organizations to use, if they choose, as a means in helping for the future, explained Renee Kramer, NCDEQ’s Title VI and environmental justice coordinator.

“Of course, there’s not one right or wrong way to use the mapping system,” Kramer said. “We really felt like we could help communities to provide a tool that has this data so that community members and, or, local governments can see what is in their community right now and help plan and envision what they want their community to be in the future. This is a screening tool. It’s not the end-all, be-all.”

The maps were created through a culmination of information pulled from various government agencies then layered to illustrate a community’s compounding vulnerabilities.

“You can’t really plan for these real-life scenarios without taking into consideration the reality of the folks living on the ground.”

Renee Kramer, Environmental Justice Coordinator, NCDEQ

The first layer is collected from across NCDEQ’s divisions identifying where and which type of government-issued permits, such as air quality and wastewater permits, exist. The second layer establishes socioeconomic and demographic characteristics collected from the Census Bureau. And, the third piece includes a community’s health characteristics gathered from the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services and county health departments.

“You can’t really plan for these real-life scenarios without taking into consideration the reality of the folks living on the ground,” Kramer said.

What is the transportation availability in that community? What’s the average income? Are there a high number of non-English speaking residents within that population?

“One thing that we have added from our data version 1.0 that is currently out is the flood layer,” Kramer said. “I think that would be a very powerful layer to consider to turn on if you’re talking about climate change and resiliency.”

James City is a prime example of a community with compounding vulnerabilities in our changing climate. It is a historically Black settlement that lies within a floodplain.

A section entitled “Climate and Environmental Justice” in the Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan states, “Barriers to property ownership have resulted in a number of climate resilience concerns specific to African American homeowners and historic African American communities. A disproportionate share of African Americans live in low-lying areas in the Southeast, which are more susceptible to drainage and flooding problems.”

Located across the Trent River from New Bern, U.S. 70 now divides this unincorporated community named in honor of the Rev. Horace James, a Union Army chaplain who was charged with managing the Trent River Settlement, a haven for former slaves and their families during the Civil War in 1863.

“In 1863 if any African American could make it to that camp they were considered free,” Allen said. “As long as we stayed there, we had a right to stay there.”

By 1865, nearly 3,000 Black men, women and children lived in the settlement. During Reconstruction, James City transformed into an independent community of free Black people.

Roughly 10 years after the settlement was created, the land’s white owners began hiking rent of Black residents in an effort to evict them from the property. The owners turned down an offer of $2,000 to buy the land.

In 1892, the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of the property owners in a lawsuit brought on by Black residents.

The ruling prompted some Black families to pack up and move. Others, however, were determined to stay.

For Allen, James City embodies a sense of place, pride and resilience in the face of overwhelming. Community leaders are in talks to incorporate.

“To go back, it’s home,” said Allen, who lives in New Bern. “Home is home regardless of what people say. It’s funny that it’s called a flood zone and other neighborhoods are called waterfront. If all the Black people moved out right now then it would be a resort community because it’s surrounded by water.”

Chapter 4 of the Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan pointedly discusses the connection Black property owners have to historically Black communities.

“Given the barriers to property ownership among African Americans, land often holds particularly high historical and cultural value for Black households. In some cases, land has been in the same family for many generations. The decision to consider a buyout, if offered one by a state or local program, is particularly fraught for these homeowners.”

Naeema Muhammad is organizing director of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network and a member of the NCDEQ Secretary’s Environmental Justice and Equity Board.

She knows firsthand the challenges residents of environmental justice communities face.

“It’s about the sentimental and emotional ties and values that people are connected to in their homes and why should I have to give up my home and my family connection to my land to satisfy somebody else,” Muhammad said. “You will hear people around the state say, ‘Well why don’t they just move?’ If it was that easy then maybe people would. You hear their stories and you hear the passion that they’re speaking from. You see and hear their connection to the places they’re at. You know, everything is not always about money. It’s about the emotional ties that they have.”

Elsie Herring does not want to leave the land that’s been in her family for generations.

She’s living on a portion of the land her grandfather purchased in Duplin County in the late 1800s.

He bought the first 150-acre tract in 1891. Before the turn of the century, he had purchased three more tracts. All told, he owned more than 60 acres.

“This has been home for my family since then,” Herring said.

She and her 14 siblings were born in a house the family built in 1921.

By the time she was a teenager nearing high school graduation, jobs in and around the homestead were scarce for Blacks, she said.

She moved to New York where she lived and worked 27 years before returning to Duplin County in 1993 to care for her then-ailing mother and a brother.

The return home has been bittersweet because, for more than two decades, Herring, 72, has been fighting the pork industry.

She is part of a number of nuisance lawsuits filed against the pork industry in recent years.

In the case in which she was involved, an appellate court ruled in favor of the families — mostly Black land owners in rural areas of eastern North Carolina — where industrial hog farms operate.

Herring said she and her family have suffered years of intimidation and threats and dealing with the indescribable smell of hog waste sprayed onto fields next to, and oftentimes directly, on her mother’s land and house.

She alleges that her family’s land deeds were illegally changed for the benefit of the pork industry.

She witnessed hundreds of dead hog carcasses washed out by Hurricane Floyd in September 1999 and remembers the stench of death.

“There were dead pigs everywhere,” Herring said. “They even brought an incinerator down the road to burn the carcasses and that made it even worse. I’m very concerned about climate change. After Floyd there was always the threat of another hurricane coming by worse than Floyd. (Hurricane) Matthew was bad, but none of them were like (Hurricane) Florence.”

“My mother lived on this land for 99 years and she said the water had never been an issue coming up that high.”

Elsie Herring, Duplin County resident

Hurricane Florence’s record-breaking rainfall in September 2018 flooded Rock Fish Creek to the point the family wondered if they would have to evacuate their home.

“My mother lived on this land for 99 years and she said the water had never been an issue coming up that high,” Herring said. “It was an excessive amount of water. We had a strange feeling for the first time that we may need to leave for higher ground. What happens when another one comes? These (hog) facilities are still sitting there. These lagoons are still sitting there. They’re still just sitting there in a floodplain. We’re already dealing with enough pollution. Not only are we dealing with the pigs and their waste, we’re dealing with the chicken houses. Those two combinations right there are a recipe for disaster.”

She remains hopeful, despite a new fight, this one against a proposed facility in Duplin County that would capture biogas from hog waste lagoons at 19 industrial hog operations in that county and neighboring Sampson County.

The project would cap open-air lagoons to capture biogas, which would be transported through some 30 miles of pipeline to an upgrading facility, then injected into an existing natural gas pipeline.

Herring is one of a number of critics of the project who argue it does not address significant air pollution from the 19 operations that would be included or possible groundwater contamination.

“It’s not being treated,” she said. “It’s just being converted. We already have enough poisonous gas in our environment.”

Muhammad said communities like Herrings, overburdened with environmental hazards, are “like ticking time bombs” in a changing climate.

“These environmental justice communities are really just in harm’s way and it grows each hour because we can see how the weather can be 90 degrees in the morning and drop to 40 and 50 at night,” she said. “Any overflow of rain creates a major problem for these communities. One of the things we’ve seen during flooding (from hurricanes), you had a tremendous number of people who didn’t have a way to get out of harm’s way. They didn’t have cars. They didn’t have public transportation.”

“I read that plan and I thought, ‘You’re saying all this, but you’re still issuing bad permits.’”

Naeema Muhammad, Director, NC Environmental Justice Network

She has read the Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan. She’s familiar with Chapter 4.

“I read that plan and I thought, ‘You’re saying all this, but you’re still issuing bad permits,’” Muhammad said.

“We have a long way to go. There have been some gains made, but not a tremendous amount. It’s not because of the will of the people. It’s because our local, state and federal governments don’t have the will to ring in these dirty industries,” she said. “If you are serious about protecting these communities, why are you going to keep dumping these same things in these places. You’re saying you’re going to do better and try to protect these communities but you’re not showing that. It’s wordy stuff that sounds good on paper. We’re not giving up that’s for sure.”

Neither is Elsie Herring.

“I would love to see change in my lifetime, but I don’t believe anything the industry says,” she said. “You can’t let man’s behavior take your joy away because if you do you may as well be dead. There’s no time to get tired when your job’s not complete and this job is not complete because the industry is a bad neighbor. This land means everything to me. We lived off this land. We were born and raised here. It’s a beautiful place. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to stay on it until I die.”

Next in the series: Resilience as opportunity

Last year, a Coastal Review series for the Pulitzer Center’s Connected Coastlines initiative looked at how hurricanes, floods, nor’easters and other major events in recent years significantly dampened any remaining skepticism on the science of climate change.

In this first installment of our latest series supported in part by the Pulitzer Center, we look at how that shift in the debate is changing public policy and what kinds of plans and possible solutions are taking shape.

The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, the most active on record, ended without a major storm, but many communities still reeling from storms of previous seasons continue to struggle to repair and recover.

The relentlessness of tropical storms and severe weather over the past half-decade has changed the dialogue on climate change statewide. State policy has shifted, too, but slowly and unevenly. While there’s consensus about some actions to further protect communities and make them more resilient, leaders are still divided when it comes to other climate-related initiatives such as greenhouse gas reduction.

In June 2020, Gov. Roy Cooper released the North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan, an extensive 372-page report on what the science is saying about North Carolina’s present and future, the state’s many vulnerabilities and an extensive set of strategies to address climate-related hazards.

The report followed through with a strategy Cooper launched early in his term to combine the effort to build resiliency with an emissions-reduction strategy organized around green energy.

A brief history

In the wake of destructive hurricanes in recent years, record rainfall in 2018, and sporadic, prolonged droughts, there was broad consensus around the need for resilience, a catch-all term that now seems to encompass every strategy aimed at weathering future storms.

The consensus on resilience has been strong enough to draw significant state funding and lead to policy changes, despite the backdrop of long-running political disagreements and budget standoffs between Cooper and leaders in the North Carolina General Assembly.

The most concrete result of the resiliency consensus is a new state agency, the Office of Recovery and Resiliency, which was formed in late 2018 to manage the massive flow of federal funds coming in the wake of the storms.

In contrast to at least a general agreement on the need to build resilience, the difference between the governor and legislative leaders on climate change mitigation, particularly limits on fossil fuels, could not be starker.

The General Assembly began the 21st century with an eye on a less carbon-reliant energy policy, passing requirements for renewable energy generation and forming a commission on global climate change to develop a state action plan.

After a series of delays and over industry objections, the commission released a 117-page report in 2010 calling for a major statewide effort to reduce emissions.

The year the report came out, Republicans won majorities in the state House and Senate and the leadership of key committees shifted to legislators openly skeptical about the science around climate change.

At the same time, lawmakers and administration officials were being courted by oil and gas exploration companies who saw potential for renewing offshore exploration as well as hydraulic fracturing — fracking — for natural gas in Piedmont shale deposits.

Within a year, the legislature embraced both onshore fracking and offshore drilling. A sweeping energy policy bill passed in 2011 declared that both industries would bring jobs and oil and gas royalties to the state.

In 2012, the legislature launched its notorious effort to limit the science used to determine the rate of sea level rise, and the legislature eventually codified skepticism of any science based on models showing an accelerated rate of sea level rise.

The legislature had a willing partner from 2013 to 2016 in then-Gov. Pat McCrory, who enthusiastically supported fracking and offshore drilling.

But McCrory’s defeat in 2016 by Cooper led to a change in the executive branch every bit as striking as the legislature’s shift in 2011, starting with unvarnished opposition to a Trump administration plan to reopen the leasing program for oil and gas exploration along the Atlantic Coast.

In October 2018, Cooper followed through on a campaign promise to reduce the state’s carbon emissions through Executive Order 80, which signed on to the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, and mandated a full review of state government policies and operations to reduce greenhouse gas output.

The order was significant because in addition to calling for numerous concrete steps across state government, it also knit together the concepts of climate change resilience and mitigation. The last “whereas” in the document reads:

“Whereas to maintain economic growth and development and to provide responsible environmental stewardship we must build resilient communities and develop strategies to mitigate and prepare for climate-related impacts in North Carolina.”

A different kind of plan

Coastal Review talked with four longtime state environmental policy experts about the Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan, what it means and whether the governor and the legislature can bridge divides on key issues.

Cassie Gavin, director of government affairs with the North Carolina Sierra Club, said the decision to combine resiliency and climate change mitigation into the state’s strategy is a significant step forward, addressing both cause and effect.

“They have to go together. I’m glad that they are and that the state is doing both things at the same time,” she said. “The plan is a good start in that it sets a path for state agencies and local governments to follow and lays out resiliency priorities that the legislature should fund.”

She said it also gives local governments a template to work from in developing their own plans. It includes a scoring system for qualifying risk and other strategies that local governments can use.

“It’s not just the state that needs a resiliency plan,” Gavin said, “every community, especially at the coast or any community near water, needs a resiliency plan of their own.”

Bill Holman, state director of The Conservation Fund and a former state environmental secretary, said North Carolina has suffered from the lack of a long-term resiliency plan.

“Unfortunately, we have a lot of experience dealing with major floods going back more than 20 years,” Holman said. “I think what we’ve lacked is that while we’ve responded to the storms, we really haven’t done much to make ourselves more resilient for the next storm.”

Many communities would like to take action but need technical and financial support from the state to move forward, he said. Success in those communities would likely spur change in other places.

“I’m an optimist about the long haul here, because it’s an imperative and we really don’t have a choice, in particular in eastern North Carolina, where becoming more resilient is going to be critical to its long-term environmental and economic health.”

The choice for many places, he said, will be to become more resilient or wither away.

Will McDow, Resilient Landscapes director for the Environmental Defense Fund, said he agrees that the report could provide a pathway for communities looking to be proactive.

“It does a good job of providing that North Star, providing those guiding principles for where the state should go,” he said.

Attitudes among once-skeptical farmers and residents in rural, eastern North Carolina are changing, he said, and elected officials are beginning to get the message.

“There’s a shift in how people are thinking. They may not believe the science, but they believe their eyes. They’re seeing longer droughts and they are seeing higher flood waters, and that’s beginning to trickle up.”

One concept that’s resonating is using natural and working land to increase resilience capacity, a key part of the plan.

In one of the last bills passed in 2020 legislative session, the General Assembly approved a plan to create an inventory of areas where floodwaters could be diverted to reduce effects on towns and infrastructure downstream.

The bill also expands the Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Mitigation Services to include natural-based solutions for flood mitigation in its grant program and to work with private landowners to provide floodwater capacity.

“Natural infrastructure is going to be a critical component of building the resilience of eastern North Carolina. It’s going to differ by watershed and it’s not a silver bullet, but it’s important,” McDow said. “Resilience is going to take a lot of different actions, diversity in all its different forms. There are going to be places where buyouts and getting people out of harm’s way are going to be a critical part of the conversation. There may be places where levees are actually needed or other gray infrastructure, but for the most part finding ways to make our landscapes more spongy is a critical piece of how we’re going to absorb more water when it comes.”

McDow said the climate report’s strong emphasis on environmental justice and bringing more voices into the conversation are also critical, because of the realities of the region.

The plan devotes a major section to a climate justice strategy, breaking down how aspects of climate change disproportionally affect already vulnerable communities.

It calls for the state to step in with funding and expertise for local communities that don’t have the resources, along with greater effort to add more local voices to the discussion and support locally initiated efforts.

“Historically, resilience efforts have not engaged organizations that interface most frequently with socially vulnerable populations, such as public schools, social service and healthcare providers, houses of worship, faith-based organizations, and public transit systems. These kinds of organizations could be the basis of very successful resilience efforts in the future,” the report states.

“This is the place where more conversation is needed,” McDow said. Policy decisions, he said, must be based on a community’s needs and what solutions are going to work for them.

“Resilience is more than flooding, it’s other longstanding impacts, water pollution, air pollution, economic disinvestment, there’s a lot of aspects to be thought about here, not just the flooding,” he said. “It’s got to be informed by those lived experiences.”

Grady McCallie, policy director for the North Carolina Conservation Network, said there’s broad recognition that low-wealth communities and communities of color in flood-prone areas that are hit repeatedly could get the biggest benefit from resiliency planning. But at the same time, they are often the communities that can least afford the planning and engineering costs that go into proposals.

“If you look at traditionally marginalized communities, they have the least ability to do those kinds of plans ahead of time, so that when the next big slug of money comes around, they don’t have anything ready to go and don’t have competitive applications put in.”

Looking forward

McCallie said the new plan has several important features: it establishes a baseline science on climate change; carries forward resiliency planning throughout state government; and looks to build resiliency in local communities. But without follow-through and without additional support from the legislature, he said, it will only go so far.

“The initiative on climate is all coming from the executive branch right now,” he said. “We need it from the legislative branch and legislative leaders are not leading on climate. There’s a lot of stuff that the executive branch can do and is doing, but there’s a lot that only the legislative branch can do.”

The most important step, he said, would be for the General Assembly to set up a reliable funding stream for resilience, particularly for planning at the state and local levels.

“Resiliency needs a stable, long-term funding source,” he said.

Holman said planning funds are important because having plans in place and a set of shovel-ready projects puts states in a better position to draw down federal support after major storms. He said Florida and the Chesapeake Bay region states have been able to tap federal funds from natural solutions because of forward planning and that’s allow them to suck up federal funds following major storms that could have gone to projects here.

“We’ve been missing out on money for natural solutions,” he said. “Some states were ready to go after those funds and some were not.”

McCallie said that, so far, there seems to be commitment to keep moving forward with Jeremy Tarr, the governor’s main policy adviser on resiliency and climate change, now leading an interagency working group on implementing the plan.

“If all they had done is put out this giant report, we’d be concerned about how it’s going to get implemented, but we’re really glad to see this commitment to staffing,” he said.

That’s important, McCallie said, because the buy-in across state government isn’t the same, and one criticism of the plan is that it is uneven, varying from department to department. “It’s evident some agencies thought deeper about it.”

While there are some steps the state can take now, the degree of meaningful follow-through on the plan and the ideas and challenges it raises will depend how much of it takes root in the legislature. Changes beyond what the executive branch can do, including additional funding and significant changes to law and policy, require legislative participation.

Given the political headwinds and the focus on pandemic response and recovery that could prove difficult.

Gavin said whether that changes and how fast it changes will determine how soon we see a difference in policies and funding on climate issues. So far, she said, climate change has far outpaced the General Assembly.

“The political process has been much too slow for the reaction that we need to see to address climate change in a meaningful way,” she said.

Next in the series: Helping underserved communities