Expert panel details challenges of adapting to climate change in New Jersey

Tom Johnson in NJ Spotlight: With global warming already occurring, the state needs to adapt to its impact even as it takes steps to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, according to a panel of experts at a NJ Spotlight roundtable on preparing New Jersey for climate change.

Participants in the forum in Trenton on Friday predicted that climate change will have an adverse affect on a wide range of sectors in the state, from agriculture, coastal communities, infrastructure, public health, and natural and water resources.

Preparing the state to deal with the consequences of climate change is a huge challenge, given that they range from identifying the people and places most at risk, to implementing a statewide policy to respond to evolving issues, to finding a way to fund those strategies to make New Jersey better prepared to the deal with the effects of global warming.

Those recommendations are detailed in a report by the New Jersey Climate Adaptation Alliance last summer, a study prepared by the group and Rutgers University, which sponsored the event. The time to act is long overdue, they said.

“It is really amazing how unprepared we have left ourselves -- not just for the future, but for the present,’’ said Michael Catania, a cochair of the alliance and executive director of Duke Farms. “There is no excuse for not moving forward now.’’

As a coastal state, climate change is going to affect New Jersey more than other states, according to Catania. “Mitigation, at this point alone, is not going to hold off some of the effects we already are feeling,’’ he said. “It’s too late to mitigate our way out of this.’’...

A police car patrols flooded Hoboken after Hurricane Sandy, shot by Alex PerkinsAlec Perkins, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license 

Lacking statewide strategy, New Jersey shore towns prepare for climate change

Carolyn Beeler at Newsworks.org: Hurricane Sandy was a harsh wake-up call for Jersey shore communities, a reminder of their vulnerability in the face of predicted sea-level rise, more intense storms and increasingly frequent coastal flooding.

Now that post-storm cleanup and rebuilding is slowing, New Jersey shore communities, aided by non-profits and academic centers, are developing comprehensive resiliency plans to better prepare for the longer-term challenges of climate change.

...With immediate repairs now over, Tuckerton and many other municipalities are beginning to grapple with planning for a much longer-term challenge: sea-level rise. Rutgers researchers project sea level will rise between 13 to 28 inches by 2050, while New Jersey itself gradually sinks.

...The Borough of Tuckerton joined with surrounding Little Egg Harbor Township for Sandy cleanup and resiliency planning. Still, administrator Jenny Gleghorn said it feels like a tiny town facing a huge challenge. "If the state of New Jersey would just say, 'This is the type of thing that you need to do, and here's some funding to help that out,' I think a lot of towns would benefit from that," Gleghorn said. "We can't be the only towns that are in this situation."

....Still, floodplain manager John Miller and some of the most vocal environmental groups in the state see the rule change as a missed opportunity to incorporate lessons learned from Sandy into coastal land use policy. In the face of rising seas, he argues putting more people in low-lying areas near the coast will make it harder to evacuate them, or reach them with emergency services....

Hurricane Sandy eats a rollercoaster in New Jersey, New Jersey National Guard photo

Experts share opinions on climate change, erosion in New Jersey

Carley Ens in the Daily Targum (Rutgers University): Concerns about climate change are increasing with the rising sea level, while erosion is becoming a serious problem on N.J. shores. Director and producer Ben Kalina screened his climate change documentary “Shored Up” at the Cook Campus Center yesterday with a panel of experts in marine sciences and climatology.

The Rutgers Climate Institute and Cook Campus Dean Barbara Turpin, among five others, coordinated to sponsor the event.  “Shored Up” discussed the impacts and risks of sea-level change on coastal communities from New Jersey to North Carolina.

Marjorie Kaplan, associate director of Rutgers Climate Institute, said the organization aims to educate and inform society about the causes and consequences of climate change. According to the film, about six inches of N.J. shoreline are lost every year to erosion. If sea levels continue to rise, changes could happen around the planet.

 “Thinking about ways in which we can address or adapt to sea-level rise in our own backyard is a dialogue that we thought would be important to the Rutgers community,” Kaplan said.

...Tim Dillingham, executive director of the American Littoral Society, said the “danger zone” caused by rising sea levels is bound to get larger and more intense over time. According to the film, the Coastal Research Center at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey predicted a 39-inch sea-level rise in North Carolina by 2100, which could have serious economic consequences.

Humanity is in constant conflict between their desire to control nature and their inability to control it, Dillingham said....

A postcard from between 1930 and 1945 of the concrete ship Atlantus off the coast of Cape May, New Jersey

New Jersey shore likely faces unprecedented flooding by mid-century

Rutgers Today: Geoscientists at Rutgers and Tufts universities estimate that the New Jersey shore will likely experience a sea-level rise of about 1.5 feet by 2050 and of about 3.5 feet by 2100 – 11 to 15 inches higher than the average for sea-level rise globally over the century.

That would mean, the scientists say, that by the middle of the century, the one-in-10 year flood level at Atlantic City would exceed any flood known there from the observational record, including Superstorm Sandy.

Ken Miller, Robert Kopp, Benjamin Horton and James Browning of Rutgers and Andrew Kemp of Tufts base their projections in part upon an analysis of  historic and modern-day records of sea-level rise in the U.S. mid-Atlantic region. Their research appears in the inaugural issue of the journal Earth’s Future, published this week by the American Geophysical Union. It builds upon a recent study by Kemp, Horton and others that reconstructed a 2,500-year record of sea level at the New Jersey shore.  Horton is a professor of marine and coastal sciences in Rutgers’ School of Environmental and Biological Sciences; Kemp, an assistant professor of earth and ocean sciences at Tufts.

“It’s clear from both the tide gauge and geological records that sea level has been rising in the mid-Atlantic region at a foot per century as a result of global average sea-level rise and the solid earth’s ongoing adjustment to the end of the last ice age,” said Miller, a professor of earth and planetary sciences in Rutgers’ School of Arts and Sciences. “In the sands of the New Jersey coastal plain, sea level is also rising by another four inches per century because of sediment compaction – due partly to natural forces and partly to groundwater withdrawal. But the rate of sea-level rise, globally and regionally, is increasing due to melting of ice sheets and the warming of the oceans.”....

A 1930 postcard of a concrete ship foundering off the coast of Cape May, New Jersey

Coastal homeowners in for insurance shock

Sarah Watson in the Press of Atlantic City (New Jersey): More than one-third of New Jersey flood insurance policyholders, including many still recovering from Hurricane Sandy, will be affected by sweeping changes to the federal flood insurance program to take effect Tuesday.

While primary homeowner policies will not be affected immediately, policies for second homes, houses that have been repeatedly flooded and businesses will see sharp rate increases, potentially exceeding $10,000 per year.

The changes will affect flood insurance policyholders across the country, but policyholders in New Jersey will feel a disproportionate effect compared to the rest of the country, according to an analysis of Federal Emergency Management Agency data by The Press of Atlantic City. And flood insurance policyholders in South Jersey appear to face the most effects from the coming changes, the analysis shows.

More than 1,600 primary homeowners in Atlantic City and more than 1,000 in Little Egg Harbor Township will be affected. Of the 10 towns in New Jersey with the most affected primary homeowners, seven are in South Jersey. Of the 10 towns with the most secondary homeowners affected, nine are in South Jersey.

Florida ranks first in the nation for the overall number of policies affected — 268,000, or 13 percent. New Jersey ranks second, and its 88,000 policies affected by the changes represent 37 percent of all flood insurance policies in the state, the analysis shows.

Of those 88,000 policies in New Jersey, 17,000 affected by the changes belong to second homeowners, while more than 42,000 belong to primary homeowners, according to FEMA data. Nearly 5,000 of the affected policies belong to businesses, and more than 22,000 are for apartment and condominium buildings, for which new flood insurance rate changes have yet to be determined...

A house in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey wrecked by a tree falling during Hurricane Sandy, shot by Tomwsulcer, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

Scientists skewer National Flood Insurance Program, citing waste, massive debt

Tom Johnson in NJ Spotlight: Want to rail about wasting taxpayers’ money? The National Flood Insurance Program might be a place to start, according to a report released yesterday by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The flood insurance program, funded by taxpayers nationwide, is rife with problems, according to the organization.

Here's a short list of shortcomings the union identified: Artificially low insurance rates encourage risky development in coastal areas; Flood maps do not accurately reflect the risk of flooding, especially with global climate change projected to cause sea levels to rise; Repeated payments to the same high-risk properties in coastal areas -- almost $9 billion nationwide since 1978.

The report also highlights many of the tough issues being debated by New Jersey policymakers in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, including where and how should rebuilding occur at a Jersey Shore ravaged by the superstorm; should some structures in high-risk areas be rebuilt at all; is the state failing to plan for future storms?

New Jersey is a prime testing ground for most of those issues. The state ranks fifth in the nation for flood-insurance policies, with nearly a quarter of a million issued by the federal government. Owners of those policies paid out $234 million in premiums to obtain more than $56.8 billion in insurance coverage, according to the report.

…With repeated disasters occurring along coastal regions in the past, the cost to taxpayers is mounting. As of last fall, the national program provided 5.6 million flood-insurance policies across the country, covering approximately $1.25 trillion in potential damages to those properties.

The program is also bleeding money, incurring more than $20 billion in debt since a series of major storms dating back to Hurricane Katrina. By the time storm claims from Hurricane Sandy have settled, the total could approach $30 billion, according to the report....

Somewhere on the New Jersey coast after Hurricane Sandy, on October 30, 2012. US Air Force photo

Ew! Hudson River bacteria linked to sewage

James M. O'Neill in NorthJersey.com: Researchers have found antibiotic-resistant strains of disease-causing bacteria living in some near-shore segments of the Hudson River from the Tappan Zee Bridge to lower Manhattan, largely connected with raw sewage dumped into the river.

The heaviest concentrations of these drug-resistant bacteria were found along the Hudson's shoreline near Piermont Pier in Rockland County and at Yonkers in Westchester County. They were also found on the Manhattan side of the river at 125th Street, as well as in Flushing Bay near La Guardia Airport and in Newtown Creek, which separates Brooklyn and Queens.

...The locations with heavy concentrations of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria also had high numbers of certain bacteria that indicate the presence of raw sewage in the water. Many older sewer systems combine sewage and storm water from streets, but during heavy rains cannot handle the added volume and dump raw sewage into the Hudson through combined sewer outfalls....

Aerial view of the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson, shot by Ajay Tallam, Wikimedai Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Long-buried New Jersey seawall spared coastal homes from Hurricane Sandy's wrath

Press release from the National Science Foundation: Picture two residential beach communities on the New Jersey shore: Bay Head and Mantoloking. They sit side-by-side in Ocean County on a narrow barrier island that separates the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay.

Before Hurricane Sandy landed on Oct. 29, 2012, a motorist traveling north would pass through Mantoloking into Bay Head. He or she would note few changes in residential development, dunes, beaches or shoreline.

The difference, however, was hidden under the sand. A long-forgotten, 4,134-feet-long seawall buried beneath the beach helped Bay Head weather Sandy's record storm surges and large waves, says geoscientist Jennifer Irish of Virginia Tech. The stone structure dates to 1882. Its reappearance in 2012 surprised many area residents, underscoring the difficulties transient communities have in planning for future threats along their shores, Irish says.

"It's amazing that a seawall built nearly 150 years ago, then naturally hidden under beach sands and forgotten, would have a major effect under the conditions in which it was originally designed to perform," says H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences.

..."This finding should have major implications for coastal planning, as sea level rises and storms increase in intensity in response to global warming," says Lane. The results, published online this week in the journal Coastal Engineering, illustrate the need for multi-levels of beach protection in coastal communities, Irish and colleagues say. Irish is the paper's lead author...

Post-Sandy in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, shot by Jacopo Werther, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Prepare now or face flooding, report warns Jersey Shore

Kirk Moore in USA Today via the Asbury Park Press: ...The economic fallout from Hurricane Sandy will be the future of the Barnegat Bay region for decades to come unless communities do more to prepare for sea-level rise, say Rutgers University researchers whose new report focuses intently on the economic risks from climate change for New Jersey's Ocean County.

For communities like Beach Haven West, it's an ominous warning that former marshlands converted to resort housing in the 1960s — and now, year-round homes — will be hit again and again without new investments to keep neighborhoods safer from high-water storms. Those measures could include both "hard" public works, like improved drainage systems and wave barriers, and "soft" projects like restoring wetlands as storm buffers, the report says.

"The biggest thing we run into is people are confused: 'Do I have to raise my house or not?' " said Pastor Drew Overgard of Cedar Run Assembly of God in West Creek, N.J., which sponsors volunteer teams that are rebuilding homes in Beach Haven West. Coordinated by churches of the Southern Ocean County Community Resource Center, the work crews are trying to make homes habitable again for seniors, the uninsured and under-insured.

..."It's not just sea-level rise," said Robin Leichenko, an economic geographer with Rutgers who led the climate impact project. "There's a whole fleet of things people need to think through," such as longer droughts and forest fire seasons in the Pine Barrens," a heavily forested area of coastal plain that stretches across more than seven counties in southern New Jersey....

Sunset at Barnegat Bay, shot by Andrew Bossi, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Protecting New Jersey from future storms could cost billions

James M. O'Neill in NorthJersey.com: The price of protecting New Jersey from rising sea levels and the devastation of future storms is breathtaking, making it seem at times that the problem is insurmountable.

Some options that have been floated include $7.4 billion to buy all 13,300 structures in the Passaic River basin at risk of being flooded by a catastrophic storm, or $2.7 billion for a tunnel to protect Wayne and other towns by guiding storm runoff out to Newark Bay.

While the huge engineering projects garner much of the attention, some experts argue that less glamorous, lower-priced and smaller-scale initiatives replicated over a wide area can often produce dramatic results. Many of these strategies — from rebuilding beaches and dunes that have been scoured away by waves, to improved building codes that help structures withstand storms — have already proved effective in New Jersey.

The specifics of certain proposals can be debated, but most agree something needs to be done. Just in the past year or so, the state has been hammered by unusually intense storms that have caused damage in very different ways. Sandy pounded the Jersey Shore and the state’s electrical grid while swamping Moonachie and Little Ferry as well as the region’s largest sewage treatment plant. In August of 2011, Hurricane Irene caused historic flooding along the Passaic River. The October snowstorm of 2011 downed trees and put much of North Jersey in the dark.

“The results of Sandy were devastating and it wasn’t even a Category 1 hurricane when it hit,” said Lisa Auermuller, a watershed coordinator at Rutgers University’s Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences. “Storms are likely to be more severe over time. And with sea level rise, even regular tides are going to be higher. Some shore communities are already seeing that.”...

Soldiers assist residents displaced by Hurricane Sandy in Hoboken, N.J., Oct. 31, 2012. The soldiers are assigned to the New Jersey National Guard. US Army photo

Sandy aftermath: Lights back up in New York, but fuel rationed

NDTV via AFP: The lights finally came back on in Manhattan on Saturday, but a severe shortage of gasoline continued to hamper efforts to get the New York area back on its feet after Hurricane Sandy. Power was restored to nearly all of Manhattan after flooding plunged the lower half of New York's most densely populated borough into darkness.

"By and large there is enough light and activity certainly to get a lot of people out into the street and get rid of that movie set look, as if we're in some sort of ghost town or horror movie," Bob McGee, a spokesman for utility company Con Edison, told NY1 television.

Crews were working to restore supplies both to schools that reopen on Monday and for polling places to be used in Tuesday's presidential election. Much of the rest of New York, however, continued to experience widespread power outages that could last for as long as another week.

As New Jersey police raised the state's death toll to 22, increasing the overall US total to at least 103, the biggest hurdle to recovery continued to be a severe lack of gasoline. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced rationing of fuel to curtail the long lines and growing frustration outside gas stations.

Starting Saturday, drivers with license plates ending in an even number will be allowed to fill up on even-numbered dates and those with number plates ending in odd numbers plates on odd-number dates....

The Hugh L. Carey Tunnel (formerly known as the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel) on Oct. 30, 2012.  Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Officials say curb development in New Jersey flood basin

Daniel Hubbard in Wayne.patch.com: Continuing home buyouts and elevation projects, examining possible long-term mitigation solutions, and curbing development.

Local, state, and federal officials spoke about those flood-alleviation strategies at a symposium on Passaic County flooding at William Paterson University Wednesday. Officials said those strategies need to continue as part of an overarching plan of alleviating flooding in the Passaic River Basin.

Residents living in the basin have pleaded with officials to come up with a long-term solution to flooding. Some have suggested a water tunnel leading out to Newark Bay. Others want floodwalls and levees constructed throughout the basin. Residents have been particularly vocal about finding a solution ever since Hurricane Irene caused historic flooding in Wayne and the surrounding municipalities last August.

Wayne is in the process of buying out more than 50 homes in the Hoffman Grove section of town and dozens elsewhere.

Keynote speaker Jeffrey Hoffman said that such solutions were considered when then-historic flooding swept through Paterson in 1903. Solutions included creating several flood control reservoirs throughout the basin. Water could be channeled and drained into these otherwise dry reservoirs during flood events. Creating a flood tunnel was also examined, but these plans were ultimately not implemented.

Hoffman is chief of water supply modeling and planning with the New Jersey Geological and Water Survey with the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). Hoffman said that climate change, increased development in and upstream from the basin, and changes in the geology of river walls have significantly exacerbated flooding in the basin...

Great Falls of the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey. After flood March 17, 2010.Shot by Andrzejzee, public domain

Deadly floods hit US northeast in wake of Irene

Terra Daily via AFP: Heavy rain on Thursday swamped areas of the US northeast already sodden from Hurricane Irene, with up to five people killed as flash floods forced over 100,000 to leave their homes.

The National Weather Service (NWS) issued a flash flood warning for counties in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland and Virginia, as towns became inundated, busy highways closed down and commuter lines backed up.

US President Barack Obama declared an emergency in New York state, ordering federal agencies to coordinate disaster relief efforts to "save lives and to protect property and public health and safety," the White House said.

Some 100,000 people in Pennsylvania's Luzerne county are under "mandatory evacuation" orders, including 20,000 in the city of Wilkes-Barre, according to local officials….

US flood victims still in the dark, stuck in mud

Scott Malone in Reuters: Residents of several Northeast states approached the Labor Day holiday weekend mired in mud and stuck in the dark on Thursday nearly a week after Hurricane Irene swallowed parts of the region with flooding. About 1.1 million homes and businesses on the East Coast were still without electricity after Irene knocked out power to more than 6.7 million customers on its rampage last Saturday and Sunday.

The upcoming long weekend, normally a celebration of the end of summer, will be a wet, stinky mess for hundreds of thousands of homeowners who suffered damage, their cities and towns submerged under floodwaters in states such as New York, New Jersey and Vermont. Hundreds of people were rescued in Paterson, New Jersey, one of several New York City suburbs that were under water while the city itself went relatively unscathed some 20 miles away.

In Vermont, the National Guard airlifted food and water to towns cut off by storm-damaged highways. Upstate New York saw rural mountain resorts flooded, ruining business for the holiday weekend. "Everything smells like sewer because the water got up so high. It stinks so bad," Melody Hawkins, 55, said as she sat on the stoop of her home in Ludlow, one of more than a dozen towns in Vermont -- an inland state normally protected from tropical storms -- to face severe flooding....

At 11:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on August 28, Irene finally became a post-tropical cyclone near the U.S.-Canadian border, the U.S. National Hurricane Center reported. NASA image

Flooding persists as US east coast reels from Irene

John Curran in the Associated Press: As emergency airlift operations brought ready-to-eat meals and water to Vermont residents left isolated and desperate, states along the Eastern Seaboard continued to be battered by the after effects of Irene, the destructive hurricane turned tropical storm. Dangerously damaged infrastructure, 2.5 million people without power and thousands of water-logged homes and businesses continued to overshadow the lives of residents and officials from North Carolina through New England, where the storm has been blamed for at least 44 deaths in 13 states.

Raging floodwaters continued to ravage parts of northern New Jersey on Wednesday morning, even after the state's rain-swollen rivers crested and slowly receded. The Passaic River crested Tuesday night, causing extensive flooding and forcing a round of evacuations and rescues in Paterson, the state's third-largest city.

"Been in Paterson all my life, I'm 62 years old, and I've never seen anything like this," said resident Gloria Moses as she gathered with others at the edge of what used to be a network of streets, now covered by a lake. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, after touring Wayne, through which the Passaic also flows, said Tuesday night he saw "just extraordinary despair."

In Connecticut, the Connecticut River at Hartford crested Tuesday evening at 24.8 feet, the highest level since 1987, according to Nicole Belk, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service, in Taunton, Mass. But she said levees helped minimize flooding in riverside communities.

She said the river could still rise slightly farther south, in Middletown, where some streets and neighborhoods were already experiencing minor flooding. Denise Ruzicka, director of inland water resources for Connecticut's Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said flood control dams and basins that New England states installed after 1955 floods helped prevent a catastrophe in the lower Connecticut River basin....

Sunset after Irene passed in Union City, New Jersey, shot by Luigi Novi (or Nightscream), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Sea level will rise a foot higher on New Jersey Coast by 2050

Kirk Moore in the Asbury Park Press (New Jersey): Sea level likely will be a foot higher along New Jersey by 2050, and at the end of the century “Atlantic City’s going to see three feet,” said geology professor Ken Miller of Rutgers University.

To see what the beaches would do on their own in response to rising sea levels, just compare the present geographic locations of Island Beach State Park or the wildlife refuge at Holgate to those of the heavily developed resort neighborhoods next door.

“It’s not that they’re disappearing — they’re moving,” said Norbert Psuty, professor emeritus at Rutgers, displaying aerial photographs that show the wild beaches shifting hundreds of feet westward. “Island Beach is in the process of breaking down and being transported inland,” Psuty said at a Wednesday conference on climate change and coastal hazards. At the southern tip of Long Beach Island, the refuge beach now lines up with the middle of Holgate’s street grid.

“What we’re seeing today is unprecedented” — a regional sea level rise rate of 4 millimeters per year after millennia during which sea level was stable or rising by perhaps 1 millimeter a year, Miller said. He studies the shifting coastline with core samples that drill down through tens of thousands of years of sediment.

It’s the fastest increase since the end of the last ice age, when melting glaciers raised sea levels by 40 millimeters a year, Miller told a crowd that included more than 200 area high school students….

Campers at the Island Beach State Park, New Jersey, shot by Gaurav Pandit, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

New Jersey must take immediate action to address Passaic River flooding

A commentary by Jeff Tittel in New Jersey Newsroom: For the first time the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has denied funding to New Jersey for the March flooding of the Passaic River. FEMA did not consider the flood event major enough to be a disaster. For the people who live along the Passaic River it is a disaster. The impact on their homes, families, and lives is devastating. The March flood was the second big flood they faced in little over a year. These people should not be put through this type of disaster time and time again. The FEMA decision came at a time when people are still cleaning up from another flood that happened earlier this week.

…This decision reinforces the need to have buyouts on Passaic River. The homes that constantly flood need to be purchased. We should remove those houses and restore the flood plain. In the long run this approach is cheaper for tax payers, better for the environment, and better for the families next to the river.

Even though most of the families have flood insurance, it is subsidized by tax payers. People without flood insurance tend to be poor people or senior citizens that do not have mortgages. But more importantly the people that go through these disasters time and time again have to be moved out of harms way.

…Gov. Christie has placed roll backs on flood hazard rules, removing key protections like zero net fill and stream buffers. He has weakened storm water rules which would require recharging and detention of stormwater as well as buffers. The DEP has proposed a waiver rule that is so vague that virtually any development project can skirt the rules of critical environmental programs. Christie has been weakening the Highlands regulations by attempting to repeal the Highlands Act through appointments to the Highlands Council that are pro-development. Weakening protections in the Highlands will result in more flooding in the Passaic River Basin as the headwaters in the Highlands lose the capacity to store water as a result of development…

The Great Falls of the Passaic River at Paterson, New Jersey, a site enshrined in the William Carlos Williams poem. Shot by Contranova

Rising sea level bringing change to coastal life

Kirk Moore in the Asbury Park Press (New Jersey): …Climate change is already forcing subtle adjustments in how people live along the coast, from insurance costs to community planning, according to speakers at a panel on climate-change effects at the Shore, hosted today by Monmouth University's Urban Coast Institute and co-sponsored by the Jersey Shore Partnership and Monmouth-Ocean Development Council.

"Adaptation is already well under way," said Radley Horton, a scientist with Columbia University's Center for Climate System Research and an adviser to New York City's climate change committee. City planners are looking to protect critical infrastructure from sea-level rise, conservatively projected at 1 to 2 feet in this century, he said.

Even if storms don't increase in strength and frequency, that sea-level rise will mean that today's storm floods of about 8 feet above mean low water will occur five times as frequently, Horton told the gathering in Wilson Hall. Speakers also warned that "nuisance flooding" will become more common in coastal communities as the sea-level trend continues.

"Coastal communities are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to global warming," said Belmar Mayor Kenneth E. Pringle, who talked about mitigation plans for his town, such as redirecting storm water drainage away from Silver Lake, and even developing a contingency plan to pump storm overflows from Lake Como into the sea.

"There is a focus in the American mind-set that (Hurricane) Katrina is what we have to worry about," Pringle said, referring to the $40 billion disaster of 2005. Instead, he foresees how smaller but "frequent, progressively damaging storms" could in time reduce the quality of life at the Shore and make it difficult to invest…..

Flooding from Hurricane Gloria in 1985, Cape May, New Jersey. Photo by the US Coast Guard

New Jersey to counter global warming

Courier Post (New Jersey): Imagine a "zero-waste" Garden State, widespread use of electric or hydrogen fuel cell cars and green buildings that conserve energy and water. That's one vision for the future to 2050 in a draft state report released recently.

…And a major concern in New Jersey is sea level rise because of global warming, the draft state report says. "The state is especially vulnerable to significant impacts" because of land subsidence, the topography of its coastline, coastal erosion and very dense coastal development, the report says.

…90 percent of development in New Jersey will be in areas with existing public infrastructure and 99 percent of that development will be redevelopment. All New Jersey residents will have alternative ways to get to work beyond single-occupancy vehicles.

…According to the plan, New Jersey Transit will commit $29.7 billion to keep the transit system in a state of good repair, build the proposed Trans-Hudson Express Tunnel (a rail tunnel) and complete other projects that could grow ridership over time….

The wetlands near Cape May, New Jersey, US Army Corps of Engineers

Waves of change in New Jersey's flood map

The Daily Record (New Jersey): The Federal Emergency Management Agency is updating New Jersey's flood maps, showing which areas are most at risk when the next big storm hits. These map revisions come as climate-change experts are predicting more frequent and severe storms.

Because flooding occurs where land and water meet, which adds up to a lot of places in this state we're in, the updated flood maps are both a new tool and a new opportunity to use land more wisely. The maps outline the geography of floodplains, and serve as the basis for state, county and local land-use regulations and emergency management plans. They also determine which property owners need to buy flood insurance, and what rates will apply.

Three years ago, the flood maps were outdated and didn't reflect real-world conditions. In 2005, FEMA began a congressionally-mandated modernization initiative to bring the maps and the mapping process into the digital age…..The update has been contentious in coastal Monmouth, where thousands of additional homes may be included in the flood zone; residents are filing comments and appeals ahead of a September deadline.

…But will our elected officials and state regulators make the all-important connection between this new data and what it tells us about sound land use decisions? Protecting watershed lands and keeping sprawl away from our streams and rivers is the surest way to fight flooding and pollution….