By Nicholas Kusnetz, Inside Climate News

High-tide flooding is eating away at the coastal property tax base just when communities need it most to adapt to climate change and repair the damage.

Rising seas have already eroded coastal property values from Maine to Mississippi by billions of dollars over the past decade as buyers pay less for homes in neighborhoods where high-tide flooding is creeping in, a new report shows.

The loss in property values points to a compound problem for coastal communities: Just as accelerating sea level rise forces governments to build flood walls and repair infrastructure more often, it may also eat away at the property tax base that provides many cities’ primary revenue stream for funding that very work.

“This is a real negative feedback loop,” said Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If they don’t start to recognize these issues and reports like this and open their eyes to what is definitely happening, they’re going to find themselves in pretty dire straits.”

The analysis, published Wednesday by First Street Foundation, estimates that property value losses from coastal flooding in 17 states were nearly $16 billion from 2005 to 2017. Florida, New Jersey, New York and South Carolina each saw more than $1 billion in losses.

“This isn’t a forward-facing issue,” said Jeremy Porter, a lecturer at Columbia University, consultant at First Street and an author of the report. “It’s something that’s been occurring. It’s something that’s affecting people’s homes now.”

Climate change is accelerating sea level rise and has driven a rapid increase in the frequency of coastal flooding on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts in recent decades. Residents and local businesses are already feeling the costs.

As the problem has worsened, advocacy groups and some financial institutions have begun warning about the potential for cascading economic impacts from rising seas.

In 2016, Freddie Mac, the federally-backed mortgage company, warned that sea level rise would eventually destroy billions of dollars worth of property. Homes represent many Americans’ largest asset, it noted, and the inevitable decline in coastal property value could ripple throughout local economies. Homeowners might decide to stop paying off their mortgages if their home values drop below the balance they owe the bank.

While these economic losses might happen gradually, the Freddie Mac report said, “they are likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing crisis and Great Recession.”

The credit rating agency Moody’s Investors Service warned local governments in 2017 that they could face lower ratings if they fail to adapt to climate change, a decision that would raise the cost of borrowing money through bonds.

“What they essentially laid out was, when you have a disaster and that affects your property tax revenues, that’s going to affect your credit rating,” Moore said. “If you haven’t put the measures in place to weather that storm, you’re going to get impacted right at the moment when you need to borrow.”

The First Street report shows that these effects may already be occurring.

While some groups have estimated the value of property at risk in the future, Porter said the new report is the first to provide specific data over such a broad area about the effects on real estate that have already happened.

Porter and Steven McAlpine combined tide gauge data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with elevation data from the United States Geological Survey to map tidal flooding parcel by parcel. They then compared sales of similar homes in areas at risk of flooding to homes in dry neighborhoods.

While they found that prices generally increased, even in neighborhoods with recurrent flooding, property values in areas with nuisance flooding were rising much more slowly. That difference accounts for their total estimated loss in value.

The greatest loss from 2005 to 2017 was in Ocean City, New Jersey, a resort town that saw a loss in property value of about $500 million, the analysis estimated. Miami Beach, Florida, was second, with more than $300 million in home value wiped out.

What Cities Can Do

The rankings skew toward prosperous, densely populated areas, Porter said, because they’re based on value. But a tool on the organization’s website shows that many working class communities are getting hit too, even if it doesn’t translate into as large a dollar figure.

Chesapeake, Virginia, for example, has nearly as many at-risk homes as Ocean City but lost a fraction of the total value. Porter said these losses can be more devastating if they represent a larger proportion of a family’s wealth, or of a town’s total tax revenue.

While governments and residents are already incurring these costs, Moore said there’s a lot they could do to soften the blow.

Towns need to reorient their planning and revenue to discourage coastal development and ease their reliance on the taxes it generates, he said. On the federal level, Moore said, Congress should require that flood risks are disclosed as part of home sales, and that federal flood maps reflect future risks caused by rising seas.

While communities try to adapt to the rising risks and damage from climate change, an increasing number of cities are also taking steps to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global warming.

Matthew Eby, First Street’s executive director, said it’s clear from their research that the costs of failing to act are piling up. “We’re going to have a much different conversation over the next five, 10, 15 years about what’s actually happening,” he said. “We’re hoping that this is that market indicator that people can start paying attention to, so that we can react.”

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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Floods. Droughts. Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Heat waves. Energy shortages and food shortages. Climate change is impacting every region of the globe.

Extreme weather is taking an extreme toll on cities, communities and businesses around the world. The battle against global warming and climate change isn’t just about energy efficiency, it’s also about resilience and survival for millions of people.

The safety of family and employees is always the first priority in any emergency aversion or response scenario. Business leaders must do their part to avert crisis situations. They also must be ready to help restore infrastructure after storms. Others are being forced to move completely as part of risk aversion and mitigation.

Keeping critical technology and business processes running throughout extreme weather events can help minimize damage and loss of life.

Success or failure during and after these extreme weather events can have personal, financial, legal, and reputational impacts for businesses and government entities alike.

Prepare For Extreme Weather Events

1. Risk Management: Get your insurance company involved in updated assessments. They are rapidly becoming experts on climate-related risks and losses;
2. Build Crisis Team: Crisis aversion is priority one. A collaborative vision can help spot weaknesses and overall vulnerabilities within organizations and entire communities. Conduct a risk assessment and prioritize an action plan that focuses on crisis aversion and crisis response.
3. Assess Infrastructure: Take a full inventory of internal infrastructure so that both physical and digital infrastructure is secured. If a data center or office is located in a place that has been damaged by flooding in the past, these facilities must be reinforced or moved. Are water and power supplies vulnerable? Do we need new sources or backup plans? Losing power can destroy assets and threaten lives;
4. Evacuation Plans: Do you have multiple escape routes from buildings and properties? Do you have safe zones within buildings? Is it common knowledge among employees and other stakeholders?;
5. Communicate: Your entire organization, from the C-suite to the field technician, should understand their role in the company’s crisis communications and disaster recovery. Train to get people out of harm’s way as quickly as possible. Train to summon for assistance from first responders. Train to empower stakeholders. Other messages should be ready to help minimize damage to stakeholders and property. Training pays dividends;
6. Leadership: Before business leaders can prepare their clients for storm readiness, they should take the proper steps to secure and manage their own organization. Industry leadership pays dividends and minimizes losses. It also can put your organization in a position to capitalize on recovery efforts;
7. Automate and Orchestrate: Companies should embrace automation and orchestration of the recovery processes, which sets pre-determined plans to retrieve critical data in the event of a disaster. More enterprises are using cost-effective, hybrid IT environments to manage hardware and software across different vendors and geographies. Without automation though, a manual recovery plan can take time away from experts that could be used to focus on more high-level duties;
8. What Else? Who and what are vulnerable? Brace for the worst and hope for the best, but failure to plan for a crisis is planning to fail; and
9. Train: Constantly test your infrastructure and your overall crisis response plan in the days and months before an actual incident.

Continually audit your organization and your community for emerging and overlooked vulnerabilities. Vision and leadership are more important now than ever.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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After the storm, after the flooding, after the investigations, the US realized what happened to New Orleans on August 29, 2005 was not a natural disaster. The levee system built by the US Army Corps of Engineers had structural flaws, and those flaws were awaiting the right circumstances.

New Orleans is not unique in its vulnerability. The city endured a lot of scolding in the aftermath of Katrina, as if the storm was the penalty for poor urban planning.

Many coastal cities and regions could face a similar confluence of catastrophic conditions. The seas are rising, a storm is coming, and critical infrastructure is vulnerable.

As CO2 levels rise, the air will warm. Warmer air melts glaciers, which drip into the sea—even as the water itself warms, too. Both cause the oceans to rise. Even if the entire planet stopped emitting carbon dioxide, Earth would continue to warm.

“We’ve got at least 30 years of inertia in terms of sea level rise,” says Trevor Houser, a Rhodium Group economist who studies climate risk. And even if the sea weren’t rising, the rate of urban growth will more than double the area of urban land at high flood risk, according to a study Global Environmental Change published earlier this year.

But the sea is rising, at about .13 of an inch per year, for the past 20 years. (It was rising before then, too, but at about half the rate for the preceding 80 years.) Another recent study calculated that the world should expect about 4 feet of sea level rise for every degree Fahrenheit the global average temperature rises. This puts nearly every coastal city, in every coastal state, in danger of floods. Climate Central has an extensive project looking at sea level risk, if you’re curious about your city’s risk.

Warm air also holds more moisture, and moisture holds more energy, hence stronger (though not necessarily more frequent) storms. Those storms combine with high sea levels to create a danger greater than the sum of their parts. In a combined flooding event, a severe storm traps a city between rainfall and surging seas. Higher sea levels cause rivers to back up, water tables to saturate, shorelines to shorten. Storms—which are likely to be stronger than before—have fewer options to run off, so they pool and flood. And America built its coastal civilization oblivious to their threat.

Florida is the most climate-threatened swath of American soil. It’s low, flat, built on porous limestone, and hurricane prone.

According to a new analysis by disaster insurance agency Karen Clark and Co., Florida has four of the 10 US cities most vulnerable to combined flooding events.

Florida, knowing its place in the world, has copious levees and seawalls. But the levees are there mostly to protect against the Everglades. The seawalls are about as good at breaking a hurricane as a hood ornament is at breaking the wind. And all of that infrastructure is of little use in the face of combined flooding events—the sea will simply come up from below. Miami flooded last year when the storm sewers backed up because the water table was too high to drain them.

The Sunshine State’s geography makes it an easy target for blame (not to mention hurricanes). But if there’s anything the US should have learned in the decade since Katrina, it’s that storms don’t always hit where you expect them—because, you know, Sandy. “Florida is definitely the most vulnerable place, but you also have places like Norfolk that are built on the coastal floodplain, and parts of New England where there is a lot of sunk infrastructure very close to the increasingly vulnerable coast,” says Houser. The pattern repeats itself all along the Atlantic coastal plain: Physical protections are largely insufficient to protect against a new class of climate threats.

And then, sometimes, that infrastructure falls apart entirely. Louisiana’s levees couldn’t have held off Katrina entirely, but it was their collapse, not the hurricane itself, that turned the Big Easy into a bathtub. “Some were improperly designed, some were improperly constructed, the rest were improperly maintained,” says Sandy Rosenthal, the director of Levees.org, an infrastructure watchdog group.

That same sentence could apply to key infrastructure nationwide. A lot of the country’s infrastructure—its bridges, transportation corridors, airports, seaports, water supply systems, electrical grids, flood control, and so one—were built poorly, hastily, or both. A lot of it is old and neglected. In a 2013 survey, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave US infrastructure a D+ grade.

“A lot of infrastructure went up in the mid-century,” says Solomon Hsiang, a UC Berkeley economist who studies public policy. “Now we’re reaching the end of the natural lifetime of that infrastructure, and we need to decide that we can no longer ride on all the investment that occurred 50 or 60 years ago.” Much of this stuff is directly vulnerable to climate change. Earlier this year, the Army Corps of Engineers released two surveys describing hundreds of dams and thousands of levees vulnerable to rising seas and stronger storms. Threats identified—but not yet remedied.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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