New Jersey is suing a beach town for taking 'self-help' measures to protect itself from rising seas. More such climate conflicts are coming
that the process of adapting to increasing heat, droughts, storms, and sea level rise needs to be locally-led. Yet, because environmental systems and financial resources are shared regionally and nationally, it would be chaos if towns acted on their own. In the U.S., the complexity is compounded by a multi-layered system of government and a robust set of environmental laws.
This is the first case that TIME is aware of in which a state has sued a community for its actions to address climate risk. But Dale says more may be coming, as towns increasingly find themselves on the front lines of climate change. “Each city, each community, each neighborhood, is making up its response from scratch, and that’s creating a lot of tensions,” she says. “We’re going to run into all kinds of conflict. “New Jersey is not ignoring the state’s coastal erosion problem.
The state carried out a beach nourishment project for North Wildwood between 2009 and 2012, moving sand from an inlet just north of town, but it has been washed away by a series of major storms. Since then, the town says efforts to save its beach have been in limbo. North Wildwood sits in a highly exposed spot, on the northern edge of a seven square mile barrier island jutting into the Atlantic. Most of the sand that has been washed off its beaches has ended up just down the coast, fattening the beaches at the neighboring towns of Wildwood and Wildwood Crest.
Rather than using the conventional offshore dredging method, New Jersey says the solution here is for the Army Corps to pump 1.3 million cubic yards of sand from those towns’ shoresalong the length of the barrier island, as well as an extra protective berm at North Wildwood. The federal government has already agreed to contribute 65% of the $22 million construction cost, with the state paying most of the rest.
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