Massachusetts Climate Chief Hoffer today reported close to one hundred pages of recommendations about how we get where we need to get in response to our climate emergency before it is too late.  The small but tenacious Massachusetts Climate Office deserves our thanks for what it has accomplished in only the first nine months of the Healey-Driscoll Administration.  

I'll have much more to say about many of the Climate Chief's excellent recommendations but today I need to focus on one critically important thing missing from the report – a recommendation that the Commonwealth's laws be revised immediately to make it easier to protect ourselves against the climate change that is already upon us as a result of the GHGs that have been released into our atmosphere over the past century.

If one believes the scientists, we have seven years, or less, to materially improve our coastal resilience.  As the Climate Chief's report recognizes, with 1,500 miles of coastline, “a strong maritime economy, and [a] growing coastal population, the Commonwealth is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise and coastal impacts of extreme weather events, including storm surge.”   

Given that existential threat, it may come as a surprise to you that it is harder to implement nature-based coastal resilience projects in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts than pretty much anywhere else in the United States.  Under the current regulatory regime, it can take the seven years we now have left to reach an end of the process of permitting nature-based resilience solutions.  That's because our regulations drafted in the 1980s era of "letting nature take its course" prohibit, or at least make incredibly difficult, many nature-based resilience solutions to the storm surges that are already a regular occurrence on our coasts.

Needless to say, there have been material advances in the science of resilience over the past forty years which are ignored by our current regulations.

No amount of additional planning or funding can overcome the drag on nature-based resilience caused by these antiquated regulations or the belief that even a GHG supercharged climate should be allowed to take its course which is still held by some regulators and NGOs.

I wholeheartedly agree with the Climate Chief that “there is a high degree of agreement among advocates, researchers, philanthropy, and local governments that a centralized plan should be developed and that a central entity be tasked with primary responsibility for implementing the plan.”  But there are things that must be done in the meantime.  One of those things is immediately bringing our regulation of nature-based resilience solutions into the 21st century.  The revisions needed to those regulations are not many, but they are significant.  I wish that had been one of the Climate Chief's recommendations and I'm concerned that it wasn't.