Stream 7B: Coastal Management

Moderator: Richard Nunn, Environment Agency, UK

Comment - Jonathan Hird, Moffatt & Nichol: I wanted to commend you on acknowledging what is quite often one of our biggest impediments to doing these schemes, and that’s getting the support or the political willpower to make these decisions that are quite often political suicide to re-election if we don’t get behind them. We just need to get past timeframes that are cyclical around electoral cycles. Thanks for acknowledging that, because it’s a big headache for all of us.

Question - Heidi Moritz, US Army Corps of Engineers: We’ve needed to adjust a lot of our technical assumptions, technical terminology, to better explain what we expect to see with climate change. My question is, do we need to modify our terminology metrics and perhaps value statements to go along with that? Do we need to reimagine how we’re talking about it? Sue made a really good point that the collaboration, the discussion, the sharing of perspectives is so important. Well, the language that we use to talk about that can also be important. From just one example, resilience, we all agree we should be looking at resilience. But when it comes right down to it, calculating the value of that and incorporating that into our decision making at the end, I find is really not captured very well. So, we all agree we should be doing it, but are we doing it? Not if the economics don’t work out?