“No time to waste”: SC adopts first resilience plan to cope with stronger storms

COLUMBIA Governor Henry McMaster and administration officials have announced a long-awaited plan to respond to the impact of climate change on a growing population. Released June 29, the plan focuses on strengthening the state’s data collection efforts and preserving the state’s natural defenses against rising seas and stronger storms.

The heavy report, which runs 746 pages and contains more than 50 recommendations, focuses on better data collection efforts, mitigating floods by conserving natural environments such as marshes and forests, and encouraging local governments to introduce regulations that reduce risky development in areas prone to flooding.

The new effort is the direct work of the state’s Office of Resilience, a cabinet agency created in 2021. Building resilience to increasingly severe storms is an ambitious goal for a new agency. The question remains: What will change for the communities hardest hit by the hurricanes?

A new focus on anticipating storm impacts is one of them.

“This work and our history are very much connected to hurricanes,” said Carissa Cochrane, director of communications for the South Carolina Office of Resilience. The predecessor to her current office was an interim agency that went by another name, the South Carolina Disaster Recovery Office, which was formed in 2015 in the aftermath of Hurricane Joaquin.

Cochrane said the term “resilience” came to the fore during the years the temp agency was responding to Joaquin and later hurricanes Matthew and Florence. In dealing with the hurricane recovery, he said, the state realized it needed to do a better job of gathering data, anticipating flood waters, raising community awareness, and safeguarding the already existing storm surge.

They also wanted to define what resilience means for South Carolina.

“We define resilience as the ability of communities, economies and ecosystems to anticipate, absorb, recover and thrive when environmental changes and natural hazards are presented,” Cochrane said.

One of the visible changes coastal communities can expect as a result of the plan is a new flood warning signage program. This will provide road signs indicating high tide in places with heavy storm surges. The height of the sign will be the height of the upper waterline, Cochrane said, and will help raise public awareness of areas at risk.

Another visible outcome will be the conservation of natural undeveloped areas, such as coastal wetlands and forests, which already provide flood protection and mitigation.

The resilience office plans to hold public meetings within the state’s eight watersheds to get local input on which areas should be prioritized for conservation and other resilience planning decisions. In early 2023, the office received a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Federation to hold a series of public meetings in the Salkehatchie River Basin. Cochrane said it could be a model to be replicated in the state’s other seven watersheds.

Coastal communities will not see these new signs of flooding or protected areas appear at any time this year. These projects will take some time to implement.

But state officials and the governor have insisted the plan will provide an immediate boon for this year’s hurricane season: a much larger effort to gather better data on flooding and flooded communities.

“Our state has a lot of water,” McMaster told the press. Mostly, that’s a good thing, he said. “But we’re going to have a problem if we don’t take the steps to find out what water we have, where we have it, when we have it.”

The state’s resilience plan is supported by approximately $200 million in funding McMaster secured from the legislature in this year’s budget talks for resilience efforts.

The office also hopes to act quickly to dramatically increase the number of weather stations and river and groundwater monitors across the state. The move will improve understanding of water patterns and how they are changing, as well as improve the state’s ability to adapt and predict, said Alex Butler, director of resilience planning for the offices, who led the report’s creation.

For example, recent studies have shown that not only are South Carolina’s tides rising with climate change, but the state’s coastline is sinking, Butler said. But there are no sensors on the ground that measure the phenomenon. It was discovered through remote sensing, which is often done with aerial or satellite observation, he said. The office hopes to change that, and fast.

Finally, the state hopes to use education, outreach and encouragement to local communities to introduce stricter building codes to ensure no more homes and businesses are built in at-risk areas. Butler said the office also hopes to create a pre-disaster acquisition program that offers money to homeowners in flood-prone regions to relocate before disasters strike. The current program only buys homeowners after the storms.

The resilience office plans to take the new plan on a statewide road show in the coming months to coordinate with local officials and watershed districts, Butler said.

The strategy offers another insight into McMaster’s approach to climate change, which none of the speakers mentioned directly during the announcement.

McMaster focused on the state’s adaptation to climate change with a strong emphasis on conservation, while efforts to stem carbon emissions are not directly mentioned. However, McMaster has become a national leader in promoting EVs and hosted a recent Energy Summit in Colombia that featured a meaningful discussion of nuclear technology.

The Resilience Report itself contains myriad references to climate change and climate science.

Here in South Carolina, under the governor’s leadership, we have been able to dispel the need to choose between economic and environmental sustainability, said Tom Mullikin, former chairman of the SC Floodwater Commission and who was deeply involved in shaping the policy of state resilience. June 29th.

South Carolina is the second-to-last East Coast state to adopt a resilience plan. But Ben Duncan, the state’s chief resilience officer, said they have been working on many of the initiatives outlined in the report since the office’s founding in 2020.

“Every state took it differently. I wouldn’t say we were late to the party, but there’s certainly no time to waste,” Butler said.