Using a Public Health Perspective to Insulate Land Use-Related Coastal Climate Change Adaptation Measures from Constitutional Takings Challenges

Abstract

Coastal states and coastal communities are in many ways on the front line of climate change adaptation. Rising seas undermine the stability of shorelines, alter coastal ecologies, contaminate coastal aquifers with salt water (salt water intrusion), and, ultimately, threaten to completely inundate large swaths of what is currently coastland upland—upland that is often privately owned and occupied. At the same time, sea-level rise also exacerbates the impacts of coastal storms and hurricanes, phenomena which are themselves expected to become both more common and more fierce as climate change progresses. As storms such as Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 have demonstrated, these storms—especially in combination with background sea-level rise—accelerate the already increasing risks to coastal inhabitants, increasing costs to both those inhabitants and coastal governments, and the ultimate need to retreat from coastal settlement.