Newport, Rhode Island’s Climate Resilience Gets A Boost From IRA – CleanTechnica

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I’ve been vacationing in the small coastal Rhode Island city of Newport this week. It’s a stunning place to be — a celebration of sea and sail, of Gilded Age architecture and hardened fishers. As you walk out to Fort Adams and peer up Newport Harbor, it’s easy to forget the fragility of the location. It’s a waterfront locale that is being battered by more frequent and more violent storms. But help is on the way. This week Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo announced that the Department of Commerce and NOAA have recommended nearly $2 million for a project in Rhode Island to enhance the state’s coastal resilience to confront climate change and other coastal hazards.

With over 400 miles of coastline and large inland watersheds, Rhode Island’s infrastructure and systems are vulnerable. With the increased awareness of climate change impacts, building climate resilience has become a major focus of Rhode Island’s statewide planning. The awards are being made under the Biden-Harris administration’s Climate Resilience Regional Challenge, a competitive, $575 million program funded under the Biden-Harris Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.

At 38 square miles and with 43 miles of coastline, Aquidneck Island is the largest island in Narragansett Bay. It is connected via 3 bridges — the Jamestown Bridge, the Pell Bridge, and the Mount Hope Bridge — and has a population of about 60,000 people, which swells in the summertime.

While the Industrial Revolution that began in Rhode Island in the 18th century brought great wealth, it also created human-made pollution that began changing the climate. Climate change causes sea levels to rise, and in the last century sea levels rose more rapidly than they had in the previous 2,000 years.

This rate is expected to accelerate — Rhode Island’s sea levels have already risen more than 10 inches since 1930 and are projected to increase by up to 9 feet by 2100. Rhode Island is in the midst of intensive planning to mitigate the climate crisis. The historic investment in the nation’s climate resilience by the Biden-Harris Administration through the Inflation Reduction Act is investing $2 million to help underserved communities in Rhode Island develop and implement new strategies to protect themselves from increased flooding, storm surge, and extreme weather events.

“Thanks to our Inflation Reduction Act, we’re accelerating climate resiliency across the Ocean State,” said Senator Whitehouse (D-RI), who helped shape major climate provisions included in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). “This federal funding will provide a big boost to resiliency and conservation projects on Aquidneck Island and help strengthen our defenses against climate change.”

Whitehouse has been a longtime vocal advocate for climate resilience planning.

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The recommended project in Rhode Island includes $1,999,777 for work with the Aquidneck Land Trust in partnership with the municipalities of Newport, Middletown, Portsmouth, and Naval Station Newport. The project, Growing Regional Resilience Coordination on Aquidneck Island, capitalizes on the momentum of resilience initiatives already underway on the island.

Committed to conserving the island’s open spaces and building on prior successful projects, including the conservation of over 2,800 acres, the Aquidneck Land Trust will use this opportunity to grow their island-wide approach to resilience. It will offer technical assistance, capacity building, and actionable strategies for responding to climate change. Implemented projects will include nature-based solutions to address threats from flooding, increasing storms, extreme temperatures, drought, sea level rise, and water pollution.

Equity and inclusion, community engagement, regional coordination, and enduring capacity are important components of this funding opportunity, which is administered by NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management. The Climate-Ready Coasts initiative is focused on investing in high-impact projects that create climate solutions by storing carbon; building resilience to coastal hazards such as extreme weather events, pollution and marine debris; restoring coastal habitats that help wildlife and humans thrive; building the capacity of underserved communities and support community-driven restoration; and, providing employment opportunities.

Tech Tools Anticipate Coastal Flooding with Different Storm Scenarios

Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC), working with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Rhode Island, has created STORMTOOLS. This online simulation models sea level rise and storm surge. Plug in the projections, and watch Rhode Island begin to change.

• The first 3 feet of sea level rise leaves our coast largely recognizable. Inlets in places like North Kingstown and Watch Hill start to expand. Ponds and estuaries in places like Westerly Beach and Little Compton start to flood. And along most of the coast the shoreline begins to push inland. But we remain mostly intact.
• At 5 feet, we start to see blocks of homes and businesses in places like Providence, Oakland Beach, and Wickford disappear into the sea.
• At 7 feet we lose the north end of Great Island in South Kingstown and much of historic downtown Newport goes underwater.

STORMTOOLS is an instrument that provides a series of maps that illustrate what coastal flooding could look like in the future under different sea level and storm scenarios. End users, including state and local decision makers, can enter a Rhode Island street address or zoom to an area of interest and turn on/off different storm and sea level rise scenarios in order to better understand coastal flood risk for that location.

STORMTOOLS offers storm inundation layers, with and without sea level rise, for varying return period storms that covers all 420 miles of Rhode Island’s coastline. Water extent and depth is included for nuisance floods (1, 3, 5, and 10 year recurrence intervals) and extra-tropical storms (25, 50, 100, and 500 year recurrence intervals) at a 95% confidence interval. Sea level rise scenarios of 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10 and 12 feet can be viewed on their own or combined with each storm scenario, resulting in over 40 possible sea level and storm scenario maps.

At the simplest level the system can be used to access flooding estimates for the study are and problem of interest for coastal planners and current and potential homeowners. At a more sophisticated level the system can be used by professionals to perform studies in support coastal planning and engineering design. The impact of variations in coastal topography and implementation of potential shoreline protection studies can be evaluated for varying return period events, with or without sea level rise. STOMRTOOLS dramatically enhances the ability to use state-of-the-art tools in support of coastal resilience planning management.

Final Thoughts about Rhode Island’s Climate Resilience

The IRA isn’t the only source of climate resilience funding pending for Rhode Island.

The state’s Department of Environmental Management last month announced the release of the Climate Resilience Fund Request for Proposals. Approximately $1 million in funds, made available through the state’s Green Economy and Clean Water Bond, will help government entities and nonprofits address climate change-driven challenges like flooding, erosion, and increased temperatures. Applicants need to demonstrate how their proposed projects will improve resilience to these challenges and support either the relocation, removal, and redesign of vulnerable infrastructure or facilities, or nature-based solutions and green infrastructure.