Property Owners Engage in the Fight Against Rising Sea Levels

Gathering ground-level data is at the heart of community engagement specialist Steven Bingler’s mission to help business owners and property owners combat sea-level rise.

An architect, planner and activist, Bingler's work was featured by the Urban Land Institute in October 2021 at a session presented during the land-use think tank’s Fall Meeting in Chicago. There he shared key methods, principles and anecdotes for data gathering and meaningful engagement with local residents and entrepreneurs around climate challenges.

Recently, Bingler served as the principal investigator for the Global Transformation Roundtable, an initiative funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. One result of the initiative was publication of the report “Sea Changes," a document that outlines planning principles for individuals and communities to use, as they redesign their areas to make them more resilient to sea-level rise. The work of the roundtable and the resulting publication draw on Bingler’s extensive experience with local residents and business owners to build a more resilient New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

The core theme of Bingler’s approach to public engagement relative to climate change can be summed up by the statement: “I believe that the problem can only be solved from the ground up if we are all working together.”

And while he trusts that solutions to climate challenges are still possible, Bingler admitted, "I'm nervous.” Unlike many professionals, he does not believe that new technologies will come along to solve climate problems. Instead, he said “you have to approach them as a whole community,” adding that there is no expert, politician or wealthy foundation that can solve problems of this magnitude on their own.

He set the stage by talking about funding for the Sea Changes study, saying that he and his colleagues were given grants because their work is viewed as “inclusive and democratic.”

Bingler strongly believes that bottom-up solutions generated by the people, businesses and property owners that stand to be directly affected by sea-level rise are significantly more effective than top-down approaches offered by what he termed “so-called experts,” that present their own ideas to community groups and seek buy-in at the end of a workshop.

“We believe in working with communities … and that all of us working together can generate better ideas than some of us working alone,” Bingler said, a sentiment he emphasized several times throughout the session.

According to his slides, the sessions that he and his team moderated in New Orleans were conducted in three languages across 71 distinct meetings. The sessions — which focused on finding ways to rebuild sustainably after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina — taught him and his team that “planning for catastrophic events is different than [traditional] comprehensive planning,” Bingler said, a distinction that is important to establish when working on the quickly worsening issue of climate change.

His focus on mining ground-level information is steadfast as he emphasizes the importance of garnering qualitative data about the goals and values of local individuals. “We looked at the needs and the opportunities that the community could see, that we could not see, because we don't live there,” Bingler said. “It was up to them to tell us what those needs were,” he added, continuing that it was the responsibility of the planning and facilitation team to find ways to include most of those strategies in the plan.

After completing a five-month process with 9,000 people engaged in generating a plan to fight sea-level rise in New Orleans and across southern Louisiana, the document was adopted by individual and institutional stakeholders in the city, region and state. This success led Bingler to request funding from the Rockefeller and Walton foundations to share the lessons learned in southern Louisiana with a global audience. That funding resulted in the Global Transformation Roundtable and the Sea Changes publication.

For this project, he and his colleagues assembled a team of about 80 people that included some of the leading global authorities in climate change, planning and policy, as well as “adaptation” experts from places like Vietnam, Denmark and Argentina. These individuals had hands-on experience combating sea-level rise through “adaptations” at scale, such as elevating homes and infrastructure, moving communities uphill, retrofitting existing buildings to cut costs after disasters and generating the political will and funding necessary to pay for and implement these changes.

For property owners, the study provides design and policy approaches to help mitigate the effects of sea-level rise. One includes finding ways to incentivize property owners and developers to incorporate stormwater management features and green infrastructure in private development.

Others encourage local governments to develop green infrastructure programs, provide incentives for investment in stormwater best practices on private property, and promote the use of shared water detention areas adjacent to property owners.

Additionally, the study calls for providing outreach, education and technical assistance to property owners so they can learn about best practices in stormwater management and green infrastructure development.

For owners of properties and businesses in or near bodies of water, floodplains or even water drainage infrastructure, engagement in these meetings can influence projects directly impacting their properties. Bingler said commercial fishermen that participated in sessions in New Orleans helped inform dock designs that account for rising and falling water levels while still accommodating the equipment and processes necessary to ensure their livelihoods.

Bingler explained that in southern Louisiana, and in other parts of the world like Vietnam, Bangladesh and South China, sea-level change is about waters rising, but it’s also about land sinking — an occurrence called subsidence. Around the world, Bingler said, “we have places where we have subsidence and now sea-level rise, all at the same time.”

He provided an example from the Mississippi River in an area called the “bird's foot delta,” where the river had been spread out in different tributaries in the past. When the river overflowed due to high water or spring floods, it did so in a way that built up the banks of the river, enabling the banks to act as natural levees.

But after the catastrophic flood of 1927, hardened man-made levees were built to keep flood waters out of New Orleans. “So, instead of the riverbanks overflowing and building up with sediment at a constant level,” as they had done over millions of years in the case of the bird's foot delta, Binlger said, “we ended up with two different water sources that weren't channeled.” Thus, the water didn't get into some of the inward areas with marshes, sediment no longer collected in certain areas and the land started to dry up and sink.

Bingler added that the most important lesson that Louisiana can teach is that "maybe it's a good idea for us to work with nature, rather than against nature, and use nature-based solutions rather than root engineering,” or at least some combination of the two.

Bingler noted that the significant impacts of sea-level rise are not limited to coastal areas. He cited high climate-related risks in West Virginia and Kentucky, for instance, due to inland river flooding, mudslides and massive rivers overflowing their banks.

This notion may not seem intuitive, but it is based on research conducted by First Street Foundation. This nonprofit organization uses more granular techniques than FEMA to gauge flood risk by measuring flood threats from rivers, streams and creeks. First Street Foundation found that there are flood zones in the U.S. that are less-well known, such as in the Appalachian Mountain regions of West Virginia and Kentucky.

The First Street Foundation methodology generates an overall score for “community risk,” by averaging exposure to flooding across five areas: public infrastructure, social infrastructure, roads, residential properties and commercial properties. Its report indicates that the states with the highest concentration of community risk are Louisiana, Florida, Kentucky and West Virginia, in that order.

The Sea Changes study is a roughly 250-page document that outlines the findings and recommendations generated by the roundtable participants. One of the segments of the study includes a list of organizations and experts — many from Louisiana — that have created and are operating successful climate change programs and initiatives. Some of those programs focus on managed retreat to higher ground, loans for affected individuals and businesses, and disaster recovery and risk management strategies.

Louisiana has experienced and recovered from more water-related disasters than many other places in the world, according to the study, making these individuals and organizations uniquely positioned to provide their hard-won expertise.