Sunny-day flooding in Somerset County. Photo from The Nature Conservancy.
The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) announced this week that researchers from the center’s Horn Point Laboratory on the Eastern Shore will partner with the Cambridge city government to build and monitor a natural shoreline flood mitigation project along the Choptank River.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency will pay for the first phase of the work, expected to last three years and cost $16 million.
“Maryland’s entire Eastern Shore community is a front-row witness to climate change,” said Ming Li, an oceanographer and UMCES professor, who will lead the project. “We are trying to protect the town and also generate new knowledge that will be useful to communities beyond Cambridge, so this project is so extensive, as well as vital.”
But Cambridge’s good fortune — a partnership with scientific experts and robust federal funding, with the likelihood that more is on the way — is something of an anomaly in Maryland. As communities throughout the state scramble to deal with the ravages of climate change, and particularly coastal flooding, a new study from a leading environmental group finds that many coastal communities face enormous challenges when it comes to applying for and winning grant money for climate resiliency.
The comprehensive report, from the Maryland/D.C. chapter of The Nature Conservancy, is called “Supporting Equitable Access to Funding for Adaptation Resources (SEAFARE).” It’s designed to help coastal communities navigate the intensive and arcane government grant application process.
But it’s also a call for government agencies to make their method of awarding funding fairer, more transparent, more flexible and more responsive to the unique needs of discrete communities. The Nature Conservancy is hoping some of its recommendations result in legislation during the 2025 Maryland General Assembly session.
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“Coastal communities experiencing the first impacts of climate change deserve to define their own futures,” said Humna Sharif, climate adaptation manager with The Nature Conservancy, who coordinated the study. The report, she said, “lays out a framework to help decision-makers understand how they can support a vision for community-led climate resilience informed by those communities’ lived experiences.”
That may sound like a no-brainer, but it’s often difficult to achieve, The Nature Conservancy argues.
While several federal agencies are making new funding available to states and local governments for a range of climate initiatives, pursuing and winning the grants are not easy. Too often, the report suggests, governments take a one-size-fits-all approach to doling out funds.
Some of the built-in barriers communities face in winning funding include complicated legislative language that creates the various funding programs, complex and even alienating solicitation language, and restrictive funding criteria. These aspects of federal and state funding methods result in climate adaptation programs that can perpetuate and even exacerbate inequities.
The report is an unusual mixture of scientific evidence, technical and bureaucratic jargon, and the language of present-day advocacy, and it often pulls no punches.
“As we build climate adaptation pathways and ways to support communities on the frontlines of climate change, we need to acknowledge and understand that the crisis we are facing is not a nameless or blameless occurrence,” the report reads. “It is a crisis fueled by the greed and misinformation campaigns waged by fossil fuel companies and upheld by elected leaders for decades. Our current crisis is made worse by slow, ineffective action to address fossil fuel emissions and biodiversity loss by those in positions of power.”
The Nature Conservancy study begins with some regularly publicized projections about sea level rise in Maryland and about the need for robust funding to address the challenges. It buttresses its conclusions with historical explanations of why climate risks particularly impact poorer communities, from redlining to the proximity of communities of color to power plants and other polluting facilities, including large-scale agricultural operations.
While government agencies frequently acknowledge environmental justice and equity as being important considerations for grant programs, they are inconsistently and inadequately used to guide the equitable allocation of resources, the study finds.
But the study does find some optimism with the Biden administration’s Justice40 Initiative, an environmental justice goal of ensuring 40% of the overall benefits of many federal climate, clean energy, affordable and sustainable housing, and other investments flow to disadvantaged communities that have been marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.
“Environmental justice advocates all over the nation are collaborating, advocating, and rising against false narratives that would have us believe that climate action is too expensive or too complicated to undertake,” the report says.
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The Nature Conservancy has offices or is providing help to coastal communities in 13 Maryland jurisdictions. But the
most comprehensive effort right now is in Crisfield , on the Lower Shore, where the environmental group is teaming up with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, George Mason University and the University of Maryland’s Environmental Finance Center, to bring flood adaptation support to the low-lying town. Funding for this project comes from grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Adaptation Sciences Program and Lockheed Martin.
The Nature Conservancy is holding out its work in Crisfield as a prime example of the “collaborative process” that’s necessary to bring funding equity to needy coastal communities.
“When we look towards building resilience to climate change impacts across all geographies, the solutions must start with equity as the guiding principle,” Sharif said.
As for the new Cambridge project, UMCES officials said that instead of a typical storm wall, this project will create a hybrid flood barrier along the Choptank River that is integrated with a living shoreline – that will include oyster reefs, marshes and sediment – in order to prevent shoreline erosion, mitigate sea-level rise, improve water quality, enhance ecological development, and reduce wave strength and storm surge.
Historically, FEMA’s flood control measures have consisted of building gray infrastructure like levees and walls.
“They listened to the public, to the community who is being affected,” said Michael Sieracki, director of the Horn Point Laboratory. “1.6 miles of living shore is huge. You hear a lot about living shorelines, which are gaining traction in the U.S. and abroad, and they’re often associated with single residences, so this project is really large scale, which makes it unique.”
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