Does America Need Its Own Green Climate Fund?

As I wrote in a blog last month, the faith-based stewardship covenant and work of Tangier Island watermen and their families, inspired the landowners I worked with in Bedford County, Pennsylvania to take their own stewardship covenant. Their example inspired the Evangelical Climate Initiative, an important evangelical call to action for national climate solutions. So I was especially saddened to read in The New York Times’ article, “Should the United States Save Tangier Island From Oblivion” by John Gertner, that the Tangier Islanders may soon become some of America’s first climate refugees in the continental United States.

Gertner highlights that Tangier Island which has lost two-thirds of its land mass since 1850, might only have 50 years left – possibly as little as 25. The island is facing sea level rise and damaging storm surges which erode the friable turf of the island. 

Tangier Island isn’t alone. Cities and towns along the Eastern Seaboard, including Atlantic City, Boston, and Miami Beach are impacted by rising seas, stronger storm surges and other impacts of our warming world. The article gives a sense of the magnitude of the problem America faces: 

There will be dozens of Miamis and thousands of Tangiers. “The Outer Banks, the Delmarva Peninsula, Long Island, the Jersey Shore — they’re in the same boat,” [David] Schulte [U.S. Army Corps of Engineers] said. “It’s going to just take a little longer for them to get to where Tangier is now.” An excruciating question is how we will decide which coastal communities to rescue and which to relinquish to the sea. Also, there’s the money problem. A recent study, commissioned by the Risky Business Project, an initiative led by Henry Paulson, Michael Bloomberg and the hedge-fund billionaire and philanthropist Tom Steyer, concluded that as much as a half-trillion dollars’ worth of coastal property in the United States could be under water by the end of the century. And that figure doesn’t include the cost of further encroachments by flooding. As Skip Stiles, the head of Wetlands Watch, a Virginia nonprofit that focuses on coastal preservation and sea-level rise, puts it, “Is there even enough money in the world to buy out — to make whole — everybody’s investment that’s going to get soggy?

One solution for Tangier is a $30 million infrastructure project that would preserve the island. But this solution, which isn’t financially viable for the working class families of the island, highlights a host of economic, technical and moral questions that each community will face as it considers its own solutions and what America will soon face as a country:

Chris Moore, a senior scientist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation [said], “we’re not anywhere near the point where we need to write off an entire community.” Still, the science suggests that it may soon be time to consider which towns, islands and cities can (or cannot) be saved. This, in turn, prompts some hard thinking about which criteria — economic wealth, population density, natural appeal, historical value — should weigh most heavily in those decisions. “It’s just a sad fact that we can’t spend an infinite amount of money defending the coast,” Michael Oppenheimer, the Princeton professor, says. “And the concept of retreat, which is sort of un-American, has to be normalized. It has to become part of the culture. Because there are some places where we’re really going to have to retreat.

The international community has responded to climate needs in developing countries by establishing the Green Climate Fund, wherein $100 billion a year is being sought to help developing countries reduce their carbon pollution and help communities adapt to climate impacts. While not sufficient to address the full magnitude of the need, it is a good beginning.