One of my big projects this academic year at the University of North Carolina Wilmington was working with my colleague in Coastal Engineering on pulling together a workshop on regional sand management in southeast North Carolina.
Engagement was great! We had participants from federal and state agencies, county offices, local coastal municipal leaders, and engineering consultancies.
The morning included speakers with experience in the design of sand management plans. In the afternoons participants worked in small facilitated breakout sessions to identify some shared goals. Undergrad and graduate students helped and attended.
The talk on regional sand management is primarily in service to beach nourishment projects along the US coast. Submerged sand and sediment make up (in my informed but non-expert legal opinion) the classic situation of public trust lands. By this most basic reason, the willy nilly use of sand by local communities should receive a more organized approach either at the state level or among regions within states.
But there are other reasons for regional sand management.
Sand is exhaustible in many cases. Wait, wait… this is not an environmental limits line of reasoning. It’s more of a practical one. Many (not all) underwater sand deposits form over geological time scales- a long time. When sand erodes from the beach it disperses; it doesn’t all pile back up in one spot.
A lucky few communities can keep dredging the same inlet channel to recover their lost sand. (Theoretically, we could make sand. But, trucking it in is impractical.)
Moreover, many communities need sand or may one day need sand. And not everyone needs the same type of sand. So, a more thoughtful approach would benefit many.
I’m still mulling over all that I learned during the day and will have more to say in the near future. For now here are some things that piqued my interest:
There is a tendency to say that sand and beach nourishment is a rich person/community problem and a fool’s errand. I get that, 100%. However, the economics of beach communities and their contribution to coastal and state GDP starts to undermine the argument.
I agree that it was dubious wisdom to have develop the US shoreline as we have over the past ~65 years. Be that as it may, we did develop these areas and in he process created hubs of commerce. So, here we all are.Louisiana is known as a quiet leader of regional sand management by those deep in the practice. Apparently, the view is that the Dutch ain’t got nothin’ on the Cajun state.
I hear that Texas is in dire need of sand.
It is said that sand is the most used resource on earth second to water. In 2019, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) introduced global sand governance as a new area of focus. UNEP looks at sand in a broad sense. For instance, sand is used a lot in construction.
There is talk of a global “sand budget.” I was told this concept is handy for headlines but falls apart when you look more closely.There is a lack of appreciation for the extent to which the US coastline is engineered. The map below (edit* ASPBA data graphically supported by NOAA) shows the communities on record receiving a beach nourishment project. This map impressed upon me the considerable national practice of coastal engineering.
Of course, some states implement more projects than other states.
Florida tops the list. The state also has the fourth largest GDP in the nation with real estate being its largest contributor.
Beach nourishment is frequently framed as environmentally conscious, nature based infrastructure because it ‘preserves’ the beach. This protects habitat for sea turtles and birds while also protecting built structures. The framing is born by contrasting these projects with ‘hardened structures’ such as bulkheads/seawalls and terminal groins.
I see the point and I also see that beach nourishment projects are major landscape engineering projects.
Where to next for me…
There is an interesting confluence of politics arising at the intersection of beach nourishment, protectionism in policies for the US dredge and shipping industries, and geopolitics. In 2018, the following argument was put forward by an engineer for US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE):
Travel and tourism (T&T) is America’s largest employer and earner of foreign exchange, and beaches are its leading tourist destination…International tourists alone spend $245 billion annually in the U.S., which is more than the $190 billion value of the entire U.S. agricultural crop. T&T generates over $60 billion in local and state taxes that could pay the wages of every firefighter and police officer or every secondary school teacher in the country. Surveys show that beaches are by far the leading U.S. vacation destination with more day visits than are made to all national and state parks and government lands combined. However, the federal government’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) gives low budgetary priority to beach tourism and opposes beach nourishment, despite beach tourism supporting 2.5 million jobs, generating $45 billion annually in taxes, and returning $230 in federal taxes for every $1 the federal government spends on beach nourishment. In contrast, OMB gives high priority to navigation channel dredging that allows foreign products to enter the country more cheaply, costing millions of American jobs and billions in taxes. Foreign countries are increasing T&T infrastructure investments, including beach nourishment, at a faster rate than the U.S. and are grabbing an increasing share of the world market.
In a later post, I’ll say more about dredging.
As someone that has had generations of family live on this thin strip of sand they would never build a permanent structure on it. It was always for fishing or hunting camps. Even their home on the mainland near the water were meant to be moved as the shoreline eroded or hurricanes came through. I've seen coastal communities hitch their wagons to tourism and watched those places loose their soul. So no, I'm not for this constant renewal of their beaches. This plays directly with your other posts about people moving into these environmentally high risk zones and how eventually this will break the insurance system but yet we still encourage this with these renourishment projects. And the communities yell about how much $$$ they bring in. It seems like this is comparable to the bank bailouts a few years ago because "They are too big to fail"... yet in hind sight, many of them should of been allowed to fail. Nature always wins.