NC Statewide Flood Resiliency Blueprint

$120 million of public funds for a modeling exercise with outdated assumptions

Flooding is a real issue in North Carolina and legislators should be commended for attempting some sort of cohesive response such as that perhaps envisioned by the North Carolina’s Statewide Flood Resiliency Blueprint.

In the last several weeks, the Blueprint rolled out a draft report and reported to state legislators on progress.

In 2021, North Carolina legislators allocated $20 million to the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to be used to develop a Statewide Flood Resiliency Blueprint. A bit later, the legislature coughed up another $96 million to the effort.

DEQ enlisted the infrastructure consulting behemoth, AECOM, to guide the process.

The Vision for the Blueprint, some of which is articulated by legislation, is to create a model and develop plans.

The Blueprint’s outcomes will meet the requirements of the legislation based on the best available science, stakeholder engagement, and sound decision making. A key objective is to produce products that will be implementable, understandable, sustainable, and close the technical resource gaps among local planners, project developers, and communities. [emphasis mine]

Phase 1 of the Blueprint included the development of a literature review.

For material to be included in that literature review it had to have been produced in accordance with Governor Cooper’s Executive Order 80 and have current agency approval.

Only politically acceptable information allowed

This is problematic for at least two reasons:

First, the development of a statewide flood action plan has been limited to include only science that is politically favorable either by way of agency “vetting” or as direct outcome of an executive order.

This is not surmised. It is explicit.

The reporting following Cooper’s executive order was developed to support political initiatives and overseen by an inherently political interagency council.

Second, the inclusion criteria ensures that options for flood management are built upon outdated and implausible projections of climate change.

The main report that followed Cooper’s EO 80, the North Carolina Climate Science projected climate change by using the RCP 8.5 and RCP4.5. The former is extreme and implausible, and authors of the NC climate report should have known that it’s continued use was highly controversial. Even the IPCC has quietly backed away from it.

The latter, akin to its descendants-the SSP 4.5 scenarios- are shown to be the plausible high.

Imagery in the Blueprint’s draft report, “emphasis on the word ‘draft’” that cost the state $2 million to create demonstrates its commitment to outdated science.

Politically mandated science

Finally, I note that the hazard modeling technical advisory group engages three NGO’s with stakes in the climate change business.

NGO’s of the NC Flood Blueprint Hazard Identification Technical Advisory Group

If the state is to engage in organizing at this scale then there should be a simple and transparent approach to developing and prioritizing flood management projects that:

1. is not susceptible to changes in political winds

2. does not require continued commitment of large amounts of public funds to maintain, and

3. uses a robust knowledge base.

Communities have engaged in flood management in for hundreds of years. There have been some hard and unfortunate lessons learned, for sure.

One such lesson is that knowledge is often readily available but used ineffectively.

More on this in my next post.