The Coastal Zone Management Act in Its Sixth Decade: An Unsung Cornerstone in the Nation’s Response to Climate and Ocean Change

Abstract

In 2022, the CZMA turned 50, joining other statutes from what has become known as the Environmental Decade in reaching this milestone. This essay, which the Journal presents in two issues, examines the Act’s role in addressing our coast’s most critical challenge—climate change. In the first issue and installment the essay briefly reviews the social and political context in which the Act emerged, lessons learned from other statutes’ 50^th anniversary, and the CZMA’s 40^th anniversary. The first installment then reviews the CZMA’s Section 309 program. This program encourages each participating state and territory to develop a 5-year strategy to enhance its Coastal Management Program (CMP) to address statutorily identified objectives, one of which most closely pertains to climate related impacts. The essay’s first installment concludes that the CZMA is singularly well positioned at a time when it is vitally needed, the prospect of new legislation is dim, and the current Supreme Court is methodically dismantling the environmental administrative state. The second installment reviews several individual 309 Strategies for 2021–2025 to illustrate how states and territories are using the CZMA to respond in the near term to climate change related impacts.

Keywords:

• Coastal Zone Management Act
• climate change
• sea level rise

Acknowledgments

The author thanks NOAA’s Section 309 Program staff for the permission to use the unpublished survey relied on in Part III and for their review of the 309 discussion. Any errors or omissions remain those of the author.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 The author thanks Henry Bell of the Washington Department of Ecology’s Coastal Zone Management Program for identifying Section 309’s relevance to this essay’s review of the Act’s potential role in responding to climate impacts.