Equitable buyouts? Learning from state, county, and local floodplain management programs

Climate change-exacerbated flooding has renewed interest in property buyouts as a pillar of managed retreat from coastal zones and floodplains in the United States. However, federal buyout programs are widely critiqued for being inaccessible and inequitable. To learn whether and how subnational buyout programs overcome these limitations, we examined five leading US state, county, and local buyout programs to see what they teach us about redesigning future federal policies. Our mixed-methods research used interviews and document analysis to develop case studies, juxtaposed subnational strategies against a review of critiques of federal buyouts, and focus group discussions with subnational buyout managers and experts to identify limitations of their programs. We find that subnational programs can be more inclusive and better respond to resident needs as compared to existing federal programs due to their access to dedicated, non-federal funding and their standing institutional status, which allows them to learn and evolve over time. Nevertheless, these programs lack coordination with and control over agencies that permit development and produce affordable housing. This gives buyout programs limited power in shaping the overall equity of who lives in floodplains and who has access to affordable, resilient housing after a buyout. Their experiences suggest federal programs can support managed retreat nationwide by increasing support for institutional and staff capacity at state and county levels, encouraging efforts to bridge institutional silos at subnational levels, and holistically mainstream climate considerations into regional floodplain development, affordable housing production, and flood risk mitigation.

Rooting carbon dioxide removal research in the social sciences

Reports from a variety of bodies have highlighted the role that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies and practices must play in order to try to avoid the worst effects of anthropogenic climate change. Research into the feasibility of these technologies is primarily undertaken by scholars in the natural sciences, yet, as we argue in this commentary, there is great value in collaboration between these scholars and their colleagues in the social sciences. Spurred by this belief, in 2019, a university and a non-profit organization organized and hosted a workshop in Washington, DC, intended to bring natural and physical scientists, technology developers, policy professionals and social scientists together to explore how to better integrate social science knowledge into the field of CDR research. The workshop sought to build interdisciplinary collaborations across CDR topics, draft new social science research questions and integrate and exchange disciplinary-specific terminology. But a snowstorm kept many social scientists who had organized the conference from making the trip in person. The workshop went on without them and organizers did the best they could to include the team remotely, but in the age before daily video calls, remote participation was not as successful as organizers had hoped. And thus, a workshop that was supposed to focus on social science integration moved on, without many of the social scientists who organized the event. The social scientists in the room were supposed to form the dominant voice but with so many stuck in a snow storm, the balance of expertise shifted, as it often does when social scientists collaborate with natural and physical scientists. The outcomes of that workshop, lessons learned and opportunities missed, form the basis of this commentary, and they collectively indicate the barriers to integrating the natural, physical and social sciences on CDR. As the need for rapid, effective and successful CDR has only increased since that time, we argue that CDR researchers from across the spectrum must come together in ways that simultaneously address the technical, social, political, economic and cultural elements of CDR development, commercialization, adoption and diffusion if the academy is to have a material impact on climate change in the increasingly limited window we have to address it.