If you're looking for waterfront property...

by: Jason Springer

Tue Jan 19, 2010 at 03:00:00 PM EST

A panel discussion hosted the other day by Monmouth University's Urban Coast Institute and co-sponsored by the Jersey Shore Partnership and Monmouth-Ocean Development Council said that climate change is forcing changes in everything from insurance costs to community planning:

City planners are looking to protect critical infrastructure from sea-level rise, conservatively projected at 1 to 2 feet in this century, he said.
Even if storms don't increase in strength and frequency, that sea-level rise will mean that today's storm floods of about 8 feet above mean low water will occur five times as frequently, Horton told the gathering in Wilson Hall.

And the first people to feel the impact of the changes will be towns along the shoreline:

"Coastal communities are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to global warming," said Belmar Mayor Kenneth E. Pringle, who talked about mitigation plans for his town, such as redirecting storm water drainage away from Silver Lake, and even developing a contingency plan to pump storm overflows from Lake Como into the sea.

These plans have to take place now, but a bigger problem may be who is ultimately responsible when the changes occur:

Legal issues will loom along with the advancing ocean. Under common law, the state owns all lands washed by tidal waters, and "in a rising sea-level context . . . those two feet that go underwater, who will own that?" said lawyer J. Wylie Donald, who handles climate change and energy issues for the law firm McCarter & English.
A 1900 state court decision held that natural shoreline changes - or "alluvial formations," as those judges called them - can alter tidelands boundaries, and "'that rule is going to be very important for a rising sea level jurisprudence," Donald said.
But tidelands law is complicated, and the last time the Legislature tried to resolve a major dispute, it took 15 years until the state finally staked all its tidelands claims in 1982, he recalled.
"You may have that same kind of problem," Donald added. "Several billion dollars of property transferred to the state under common law? That could be problematic."

So not only does planning have to go on over how to adapt as the landscape literally changes at their feet, the law will have to keep up in the process to determine who is responsible without another major dispute.

Jason Springer :: If you're looking for waterfront property...