Coastal Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerabilities - Climate ...

84 Coastal Impacts, Adaptation, and VulnerabilitiesDuring disasters, states and municipalities rely extensively on mutual aid agreementswith other jurisdictions, spreading the financial footprint of extreme weather events farbeyond the directly impacted communities. With more frequent events, communitieshave a greater likelihood of having to respond to multiple events simultaneously, overtaxingthese mutual-aid agreements and other emergency-response systems and funding(Washington Department of Ecology, 2006).Recovery from weather-related extreme events, including those exacerbated by climatechange, is a complicated, long-term process involving virtually every aspect of acommunity’s social and economic fabric (see section 4.2). As with response, more intenseand/or frequent events will lead to more damages and thus require more resourcesfor recovery, which will divert those resources from other community functions and potentiallystifle economic growth. For example, although the construction sector benefitsfrom engagement in post-disaster rebuilding, the funds and workers supporting reconstructionare not available to new-building and infrastructure projects, limiting the communityor state’s economic growth potential (University of Maryland, 2007). Althoughinsurance is a vital resource to fund recovery from disasters (see Section 4.4.6), it doesnot cover all losses; the balance is borne by the public sector at Federal, state, and locallevels, the private sector, and individuals.Coastal and Nearshore Oil and GasAs climate change intensifies during the coming decades, changes in marine and coastalsystems are likely to affect the potential for energy resource development in the coastalzone and the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). The capacity for expanding and maintainingonshore and offshore support facilities and transportation networks is also likely tobe affected. The relative importance of climate variables and impacts to the energy sectorwill vary among regions and the context in which they are considered, and perspectiveson the relative importance of climate change impacts will differ among those whoare responsible for developing adaptation strategies in sectors ranging from industry toregulatory (Burkett, 2011).In this section we summarize the potential energy-sector impacts and adaptation effortswith respect to the following climate drivers: temperature change, sea-level rise,and changes in storm surge and wave patterns. Climate change impacts can cascadeamong different oil and gas facilities and operations from exploration to processing andtransportation in a way that is similar to the cascading effects that have been observed inmany ecosystems with interactions and outcomes that are difficult to predict without apurposeful assessment that considers all relevant drivers (Burkett, 2011).Warming of the ocean can propagate into seafloor sediments. Methane clathrates occuron the continental shelf both in deep sedimentary structures and as outcrops on theocean floor. They are common in relatively shallow shelf sediments of the Arctic Oceanand the Gulf of Mexico continental slope. The stability of methane clathrate in marinesediments is controlled by the combination of pressure and temperature. Seafloor carbonatedeposits reveal several ancient hydrate dissociation events that appear to haveoccurred in connection with rapid global warming events (Archer, 2007; Dickens, 2001;Sassen et al., 2002). Clathrate instability may lead to problems for oil and gas explorationand development operations ranging from pipeline emplacement to the anchoring of