Managed Retreat and the Grand Forks Case Study

October 19, 2023.

For residents and property owners in floodplains, assessing the cost and/or benefit of relocating is not always straightforward.

Ben Cross (20-25 min)

Notes:

  • Grand Forks Flood:

    • Grand Forks: has a population of 4000 people, but is the largest center in the area

    • 2018 flood event exceeded the 200-year level flood

    • More than 50 homes destroyed; more than 400 homes were damaged--many had not recovered from previous floods (regularly flooded area, low-lying)

    • Grand Forks proposed to buyout properties of most vulnerable areas; land restored to floodplain/ park land

    • Combination of improving flood protection infrastructure and buyouts (moving away from risk)

    • $50M in Provincial and Federal grants

    • Since then, other communities have considered buyouts as an adaptation strategy

  • Managed Retreat as an adaptation strategy:

    • As SLR continues, moving people out of at-risk areas is likely to become a more attractive adaptation option

    • MR defined as: Strategic relocation of structures or abandonment of land

    • PARA: Can be combined with different grey or natural infrastructure solutions

    • Advantages:

      • Post-retreat land use

      • Permanent removal of risk--other options can leave residual risks

      • Also benefits apply to whole surrounding area, not just the one site

      • Can be a source of societal transformation--used as opportunities to address colonialism, racism. Changing land use can be seen as an opportunity to mitigate these effects

      • Transformation as contrast to incremental change (combat path dependencies; help us recover from existing maladaptive choices)

        • Challenges what land use is prioritised

        • Protection might become maladaptive at some point

    • Disadvantages:

      • Wicked Challenges: Multiple actors, contested goals, uncertainties

      • What does it mean for MR to be successful? Therefore, when and where should it occur? Different individuals and groups experience it differently and may be working towards different objectives.

      • Public opposition and political risk

        • People fear concept in general

        • Makes it difficult to communicate and plan

        • Vested real estate interests

      • Poor retreat experiences and implementation issues

        • E.g., long delays, lack of transparency, insufficient compensation, pressure to accept buyouts in programs that should be voluntary

        • Makes people hesitant to consider for one’s own community

      • Does MR reliably decrease vulnerability? 

        • E.g., Still exposed to hazard afterwards; moved to areas that are also high risk/ socio economically vulnerable

      • Planning challenges

        • Hard to determine appropriate timing and trigger

        • How to balance timeliness with necessary community engagement? 

        • Funding and compensation levels determine successfulness, buyin levels

      • Justice and equity concerns

        • Unequal availability and uptake among racialized and low-income population groups

        • Coercion and overrepresentation in retreat programs, but also inability of Indigenous communities to access MR programs

        • Established power structures and privilege can bias these programs--how they are developed, who makes decisions?

  • Proactive vs. Reactive MR

  • Proactive retreat is likely to be more successful, but presents unique obstacles

    • Political and financial constraints

    • Discretionary, case-by-case retreat programs

    • Non-risk based insurance continue to incentivize people to live in these areas; recovery funding

    • Usually need a window of opportunity to overcome these obstacles

    • lack of local decision making tools, guidance, capacity

    • MR seen as high regret

  • Reactive retreat tends to be most frequently implemented on the ground

    • Limitations: long timelines lead to difficulties for people involves; challenges with having less time for communication, engagement, and co-production; less likely to address broader societal values and concerns; forgoing flood protection benefits of retreating people from those lands; negative psychological, environmental, and physical impacts of going through a flood event

  • CBA for Adaptation

  • Define alternatives and baseline; identify and monetize costs and benefits; calculate cost-benefit ratio

  • Limitations:

    • Value selection and monetization

      • Dominance of market values- puts greater value and realisation of market impacts that are easy to monetize

      • Omission or difficulty monetizing many non-market values (e.g., ecological, community, psychological harm from flooding)

    • Indigenous values and different worldviews

      • Principles of welfare economics don’t apply

      • Utility maximisation and aggregation vs. community well-being and communal property rights

      • Non-substitutable values (important for non-Indigenous communities as well)

      • Better to attempt monetization? Or risk omission? 

  • Deep uncertainty

    • Uncertainties with climate change dynamics and how cultural/social systems will respond to it

    • Hard to put a probability on climate mitigation efforts (e.g., reducing carbon emissions)

    • Range of alternative approaches (e.g., real options analysis, robust decision-making)--have different pros/cons, give different information; challenges with communication information and what is being conveyed

  • CBA can be combined with other methods to meet more robust outcomes and help decision makers decide which path to take and when to switch paths; a way to figure out what information is needed, etc.

    • Examples of how CBA can be expanded on through multi-method approaches

  • Other challenges in CBA:

    • Sensitive to discount rate and time horizon (large upfront costs, but benefits accrue over time; skews how results are seen)

    • Scenario, baseline, and boundary selection

      • Not always explicit on scale (community vs. country)

      • Can make results difficult to interpret and how can be incorporated into wider decision-making context

    • Non-marginal impacts, equity, risk aversion, and constraints

    • Subjectivity and CBA comparisons

    • Optimism bias and overreliance on CBA

  • Improving CBA for MR

  • Community engagement and co-production

    • MR success requires:

      • Early, ongoing, inclusive, and high-level community engagement

      • Co-production, especially with vulnerable and disadvantaged groups

  • MR CBAs:

    • Design should be tailored to local content

    • CBA’s role in decision making will vary

    • May require multiple separate or sub-CBAs

    • Integrate CBAs into wider decision making process

    • Often over-reliance on CBAs in general--so whether or not things are included/excluded factors into how results are interpreted

  • Integrating holistic values

    • Many approaches to monetizing non-market values

      • Ecosystem service valuation becoming more common

      • Replacement cost, non-use existence value, equivalent property

      • Cultural and social approaches

      • Subjective well-being and psychological effects of flooding (study from France)

    • Challenges:

      • Suitability

      • Case specific values--benefit transfer not always appropriate

      • Costly and time consuming

      • Planning well in advance

      • Adds another level of uncertainty 

      • Introduces potential biases

    • Multi-criteria decision analysis is an alternative tool--allows for quantitative and qualitative factors at the same time, but run into same kinds of problems (weighting factors, biases)

  • No one-size fits all solution

    • Important to match decision making tools and design with community in context

    • All decision making tools come with associated assumptions

    • Common factors of good decision-making processes:

      • Thorough treatment of uncertainty

      • Thoughtful inclusion of market and non-market values

      • Long time horizon

      • Values flexibility

      • Design and use will depend on strong community engagement and participation throughout the process

  • Research Approach

  • Doc. review of existing MR CBAs and qualitative, semi-structured interviews with MR decision-makers and key interested parties across different contexts to fill gap in understanding how CBAs are used in MR decision making

  • Review and perspective paper to explore links between decision-making and economic assessments with MR planning, challenges, and outcomes

  • Develop framework for guiding MR assessment

  • Test assessment framework against real-world or hypothetical case studies. Seek feedback from decision-makers

LWW workshop 2024 (Kees - 15 min)

Moving Forward - continued  (Kees)

Notes:

  • From Eric: Nature Force--funding ends in March 2025--maybe a component of this could be funding to continue supporting robust development of more pilot projects--funding to scope an idea and have it shovel ready for subsequent grants + space to have important conversations with key rights holders and stakeholders--supporting development of pilot projects--overlap of guaranteed funding from NF could be used as matching funding

    • LWW could act as an umbrella that helps to fund/ provide capacity for FNs to further develop those projects and create a hub for ideas/exchange of info

  • From Sarah Dal Santo: Focus on FNs who do not have capacity to take on these projects on their own

    • Depends on scale, geographic extent--role for LWW to play

Quick update URBC experience (Shaieree, Anwen, Charlotte, Felicia, Vanessa & Brent - short)

  • Ask LWW people at URBC to give brief impressions of timeline mapping workshop

FYI: 

  • Please see the useful information below -

  • Please send anything that you think should be on the list to Vanessa 

Anything else and other announcements 

  • Kees has been invited to prepare a testimony to the The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications (TRCM) on Nov 1, 2023. The committee is studying the impacts of climate change on critical infrastructure in the transportation sector and its interdependencies. The committee is inviting researchers across Canada to share which regions or critical pieces of infrastructure that are most vulnerable to climate change, with the goal of selecting specific case studies for further study.

Please provide any suggestions or input to Kees (klokman@sala.ubc.ca)