Edited by: Jeanne C. Chambers, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), United States
Reviewed by: Andreea Nita, University of Bucharest, Romania; Thanasis Kizos, University of the Aegean, Greece
This article was submitted to Conservation, a section of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
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Around the globe, coastal communities are increasingly coping with changing environmental conditions as a result of climate change and ocean acidification, including sea level rise, more severe storms, and decreasing natural resources and ecosystem services. A natural adaptation response is to engineer the coast in a perilous and often doomed attempt to preserve the status quo. In the long term, however, most coastal nations will need to transition to approaches based on ecological resilience—that is, to coastal zone management that allows coastal communities to absorb and adapt to change rather than to resist it—and the law will be critical in facilitating this transition. Researchers are increasingly illuminating law's ability to promote social-ecological resilience to a changing world, but this scholarship—mostly focused on U.S. law—has not yet embraced its potential role in helping to create new international norms for social-ecological resilience. Through its comparison of coastal zone management in Australia, Finland, and the Netherlands, this article demonstrates that a comparative law approach offers a fruitful expansion of law-and-resilience research, both by extending this research to other countries and, more importantly, by allowing scholars to identify critical variables, or variable constellations associated with countries' decisions to adopt laws designed to promote social-ecological resilience and to identify mechanisms that allow for a smoother transition to this approach. For example, our comparison demonstrates, among other things, that countries can adopt coastal zone management techniques that integrate social-ecological resilience without fully abandoning more traditional engineering approaches to adapt to environmental change and its impacts.
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We face a world where climate change, ocean acidification, species extinction, and changing precipitation patterns are increasingly affecting human well-being. Despite these realities, law plays an important role in promoting human well-being despite these changing realities—that is, of promoting communities' resilience to environmental change. Coastal communities around the globe are already coping with significant changes from sea level rise, more frequent and increasingly severe coastal storms, and the progressive loss of coastal resources such as coral reefs and fisheries, as warming and acidifying waters interact with pollution and other stressors to severely degrade coastal ecosystems. Coastal zone management (CZM) provides a global focus for research on how law can effectively promote social-ecological resilience to the changes coastal communities are facing.
Over the past several decades, resilience theory and ecological resilience (Holling,
Within resilience theory, and based on ecological resilience, “social-ecological resilience” refers to the ability of a social-ecological system to absorb change and disturbance without shifting to a new regime with a different set of processes and structures—i.e., without transforming into a new system state (Walker and Salt,
As a corollary, resilience theory and the documented potential for social-ecological transformations have significant implications for law, governance, and policy (Garmestani and Allen,
Over the last decade, research has increasingly focused on the implications of resilience theory for environmental law (Garmestani and Allen,
This article broadens the scope of research about the relationship between social-ecological resilience and the law. It pursues this goal by focusing on a policy issue common to most coastal nations: coastal zone management (CZM) in the face of environmental change. Specifically, this article compares CZM in Australia, Finland, and the Netherlands through the lens of resilience. CZM is a particularly apt subject for such a comparative law exploration because it has a long history of shared approaches to law and policy, facilitated by the widespread participation of coastal nations in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and other relevant international commitments such as the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, multiple treaties on marine pollution, and shared fisheries management. Advances in the science of ecosystem-based marine management (e.g., United Nations Environment Program (UNEP),
Thus, CZM provides a potentially fertile focus area for comparative law studies regarding the role of law in promoting social-ecological resilience: sea-level rise and other aspects of climate change (e.g., worsening or more frequent coastal storms) are already affecting coastal nations around the world; many of these nations engage in CZM and have been doing so for decades; and there are already international norms, best practices, and guidelines for CZM. All these harmonizing developments in the global policy arena suggest that CZM will be a fertile starting point for comparative law research into resilience, because they are likely to reduce the idiosyncrasies between national legal frameworks, thus evading the most pressing challenge for all comparative legal research. We choose in this article to focus on three developed nations that have all engaged in CZM for some time but that have different government structures and that face different risks from climate change. The human population of Australia is concentrated along its coasts and deals with sea-level rise and other risks through a federalist system that divides regulatory authority between the National Government and the individual states and territories. Finland, like Australia, has a long coast, but it is less sparsely populated, with shared responsibilities in CZM between the central government, regional councils and municipalities. The Netherlands is a much smaller and more densely populated country, much of which is already below sea level, resulting in a long-term government focus on preventing inundation, with shared responsibilities between the central government and decentralized governments (provinces, municipalities, and regional water authorities).
As the next sections will explain in more detail, we posit as a normative goal that coastal nations should be seeking to transition to CZM based on an ecological resilience approach—that is, the use of techniques and processes to absorb and adapt to change rather than to resist it. Nevertheless, our assumption at the start of this study was that the three nations we studied would instead all exhibit a strong legal preference for management based on engineering resilience—that is, a reliance on coastal hardening and structures such as sea walls. While that assumption proved accurate in many respects, we also found that all three nations are beginning to experiment with the use of ecological resilience in CZM in response to sea-level rise, potentially reducing coastal adaptation problems several decades or a century from now and suggesting legal mechanisms that other nations could use to progressively transition to an ecological resilience approach. In other words, nations can take advantage of, in particular, sea level rise's longer time horizon to avoid disruptive and abrupt changes in their CZM laws and policies.
More importantly, this first foray into comparative legal analysis demonstrates the value of such studies in generating a more robust scholarship regarding the role of law in promoting social-ecological resilience to climate change and its impacts. This article therefore ends by suggesting further fruitful avenues of research in this field. For example, comparative analyses like the one we engage in here allow for assessments of whether particular local variables tend to promote engineering or ecological resilience approaches to CZM, as outlined in the next section, or whether the factors that induce a specific nation to adopt a particular CZM approach are idiosyncratic to each country. We hypothesize based on the results of this initial but limited foray into comparative analysis that both general patterns and important individual variations will emerge, and we encourage other researchers to join us in investigating this hypothesis.
The framing and goals of a country's CZM policies are critical for how well that nation addresses environmental change. If a nation's CZM laws seek to protect and preserve the coastal zone in its current configuration and functions, that strategy would reflect an engineering resilience approach (Holling,
In contrast, other countries frame their CZM policies to improve the capacity of their coasts to absorb rather than to resist coastal change, reflecting an ecological resilience approach. Ecological resilience, as noted, refers to the capacity of a system to absorb change without transforming into a different state (Walker and Salt,
Governments implementing an ecological resilience approach to CZM generally try to maintain or improve the capacity of coastal social-ecological systems both to adapt to environmental changes and to function at high levels of desirable productivity rather than striving to “freeze” current conditions in place. Such governments might restore and expand coastal wetlands, seagrass beds, mangroves, and other coastal ecosystems both to diffuse the impact of coastal storms and to maintain productive fisheries, or they might enact significant setback requirements and impose rolling easements on coastal properties that require removal of coastal infrastructure as sea levels rise, allowing productive coastal ecosystems to progressively migrate inland. Water law that mandates reductions in the pumping of coastal aquifers can stave off salt water intrusion (Craig,
Whether a nation's CZM strategy is primarily underpinned by engineering resilience approaches or ecological resilience approaches has important ramifications for whether the coastal zones can continue to absorb and adapt to change (Allen et al.,
As a normative matter, therefore, laws in coastal nations should support the transition to CZM that takes an ecological resilience approach. We emphasize the need for legal
Scientific projections regarding coastal social-ecological stability depend on a range of location-specific considerations, including the pace of local sea level rise and ocean acidification and the cumulative and synergistic risks to infrastructure or ecological assets. Such assessments are becoming more common and more accurate as the scientific community grows increasingly skilled at downscaling and localizing global climate change projections. However, given the variations among both social-ecological and cultural realities in the world's coastal nations, the social dimension of social-ecological resilience is also critical. For example, disaster resilience is one category of approaches to using law to promote social-ecological resilience in CZM. Disaster resilience has found traction in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Parsons and Thoms,
Given the number of variables involved, comparative law studies provide a valuable method for assessing not only whether and how coastal nations incorporate ecological resilience framing and techniques into their CZM, but also what variables emerge as critical to those decisions. Comparative studies allow researchers to question regulatory assumptions and to identify recurring dependencies, key variables, and common correlations. Comparative law studies can thus help to elucidate whether certain constellations of variables make it more likely that a nation will adopt ecological resilience approaches, which in turn can help to prompt both international law promotion of such techniques and wider knowledge sharing. Alternatively, such studies could demonstrate that the decision to pursue an ecological resilience approach depends so intimately on a nation's idiosyncratic social and cultural circumstances that the ecological resilience approach to CZM is unlikely to become an international or global legal norm and that nation-specific work is necessary.
At the start of this study, we hypothesized that the incorporation of ecological resilience into coastal nations' CZM is not entirely idiosyncratic. Our case studies support this hypothesis. And our analysis suggests that comparative law studies can increase the overall effectiveness of CZM law and policy in a changing world by paving the way for nations that share key variables to also share knowledge, experience, and techniques regarding ecological resilience approaches to CZM, easing the legal transition to that approach.
As an island continent, Australia has a vast and varied coastline (
Australia's topography. The darkest browns are 2,000 m above sea level. Source:
The combination of coastal profiles and population density make Australia particularly vulnerable to the impacts of environmental change (Clark and Johnston,
Under Australia's federal system of government, the states have the legislative power over coastal management. There is no national CZM strategy or policy, and approaches to CZM are both fragmented and complex. Each coastal state and territory has a combination of laws and policies relating to coastal management, land use planning, conservation, fisheries, and catchment management, which all interact to influence coastal activities. Recent legal reforms have placed ecological resilience and climate change adaptation at the center of coastal management in Australia's two most populous states—New South Wales and Victoria
While there are important legal differences across jurisdictions, the dominant model for dealing with new infrastructure and development involves mapping current and future coastal hazard areas over a range of timeframes and with differing assumptions about projected sea level rise, and then imposing limits on new development in areas identified as being at high risk. In all coastal states except New South Wales, the state government has adopted a sea level rise planning benchmark, which land use planning authorities are required to apply. The level varies across states but is generally set at about a 1.0 m rise above current sea levels by 2,100. New South Wales leaves the determination of what is an appropriate sea level rise planning benchmark to individual municipalities, which has resulted in significant legal variation depending on the property industry's influence and the local councilors' acceptance of climate change science within a specific municipality (McDonald,
States treat existing coastal development differently. Many coastal cities are already protected by seawalls, groins, and regular sand nourishment programs instituted after historical erosion events. A small number of regional coastal municipalities have introduced policies that require the removal of buildings affected by erosion in order to allow for coastal retreat (Foerster et al.,
Current engineering approaches also often squeeze coastal ecosystems. Coastal wetlands and heathlands have already experienced dramatic modification to allow for coastal development (McDonald and Foerster,
Of course, there are exceptions. For example, governments like the island state of Tasmania have acquired exposed properties when they come to market. This expanding government ownership creates greater flexibility when the time comes to implement a larger retreat strategy. Innovative approaches that align with a social-ecological resilience framing also include spatial planning designations of areas as “future coastal refugia” and limits on what development may occur on such sites (McDonald et al.,
Finland is located on the northeastern bank of the Baltic Sea and has an extensive indented shoreline of 46,000 km (Granö et al.,
Finland's topography. Most of the country of Finland rises no more than 50 m above sea level. Source:
Environmental change is driving sea level rise in the Baltic Sea. From a coastal management perspective, that sea level rise is partly offset by isostatic land uplift—i.e., the fact that the land is rising (Finnish Meteorological Institute,
Despite the shielding effect of land uplift, the Finnish coasts are expected to suffer from increased coastal flooding as a result of rising average temperatures, increased precipitation, snowmelt, and extreme weather events (Ministry of the Environment,
Finland has adopted several national and municipal adaptation and coastal management strategies. These laws and policies seek, among other things, to minimize and adapt to the negative impacts of coastal flooding (e.g., Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry,
Like Australia, CZM implementation in Finland is divided between several state and municipal actors and legal instruments. In flood protection, the two main instruments are land-use planning and flood risk management planning. As elsewhere, land-use planning's main objective is to steer the geographical location of housing, utilities, and industrial developments into preferred places. Land-use planning in Finland is divided between the state, regional, and municipal actors. These plans range in a hierarchical order from less to more specific: (1) national land-use objectives (national government); (2) regional plans (regional councils); (3) municipal master-plans; and (4) municipal detailed plans (Ministry of the Environment,
Flood risk management planning is based on the EU Floods
Nature conservation also plays a vital role in Finland's CZM. Traditionally, all nature conservation strategies relied on a static approach seeking to shield ecosystems from change (Aapala et al.,
In sum, Finland's adaptation strategies and coastal management have relied on the natural land uplift that has until recently compensated for all or most of sea level rise, as well as some of the negative impacts of coastal flooding. As this natural benefit becomes increasingly less effective, however, Finland is developing more active measures that span the engineering and ecological resilience spectrum to deal with environmental change. Engineering resilience is present in the state and municipal strategies and plans to build new and fortify existing coastal flood protection infrastructure, as well as in efforts to increase the capacity of municipal drainage systems to deal with increased precipitation and urban runoff. In addition, current nature conservation policies and laws are based on an engineering approach because they seek to shield protected areas and species from any adverse impacts from climate change.
Ecological resilience approaches are most visible in policies to reduce the percentage of urban paved areas and to promote nature-based solutions, such as using existing wetlands to help manage floods. Steering new development away from flood-prone areas can also be considered an ecological resilience approach because it allows the natural coastal environment to deal with and adapt to sea level rise and coastal flooding. However, this strategy is often not available in developed areas, because existing housing and industrial permits commonly enjoy legal finality and cannot be re-evaluated or modified in light of new scientific knowledge about sea level rise and flood risks. This remains one of the most pressing challenges for shifting existing infrastructure onto a more climate resilient path.
A delta region located in the northwest of continental Europe, 18% of the Netherlands' territory (41,526 km2) is covered by water (Van de Ven,
The Netherlands' topography. The darkest blue areas are 7–12 m below sea level, while the deepest red areas reach 350 m above sea level. Gold areas are 25–40 m above sea level. Source: Netherlands Topographic 3D Map MakerEdChallenge 2 0 by mitrasmit,
Sea level rise will strain this system, but fundamental changes in law and policy are unlikely in the short term. Recent estimates indicate that sea level will rise 1.8–2.0 mm per year on average, resulting into a total of 25–80 cm by 2,085 (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI),
The 523-km-long Dutch coastline stretches from the southwestern peninsulas (Scheldt estuary/Rhine-Meuse delta) to the Wadden Islands/Wadden Sea Region in the north and the Ems-Dollard estuary in the northeast (
As noted, the Dutch coastline plays an essential role in preventing the hinterland from flooding and, given its sandy nature, forms a particular domain within the Dutch flood risk governance structure (Van Rijswick and Havekes,
Nevertheless, overall, the Netherlands strives to keep its coastline and dune system stable and resistant to natural evolution, an inherently engineering resilience approach to CZM. Indeed, many policy documents use the term “veerkracht” (resilience) to refer to the coast's ability to bounce back to the status quo. In addition, this engineering resilience approach will not be ending any time soon: with a predicted sea level rise of 0.25–0.80 m by 2085 (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI),
Moreover, hard engineering approaches remain important backstops to sand supplementation as sand supplementation does not always work to provide the legally required level of flood protection at some locations. These are the so-called “weak links” in the Dutch coastal defense system. At these locations, the relevant regional water management authorities have implemented additional or alternative measures to meet the legal security standards for “primary flood defense structures” (Article 2.4 of the Dutch Water Act 2009), such as building concrete constructions in dunes (Gilissen et al.,
Apart from flood protection, dynamic CZM through sand supplementation and other supportive measures (e.g., opening the Haringvliet sluices and flooding the Hedwigepolder) can be beneficial for environmental protection, contributing to the Dutch coast's and hinterland's ecological potential. Seven habitat types are present along the Dutch coast, and each is home to many protected and common species (
Australia, Finland, and the Netherlands are developed nations, and they all have significant financial and infrastructure investments in their coastal zones. In addition, each nation has already significantly altered large swaths of its coastal ecosystems, losing considerable ecosystem function to development. As might be expected, the legal and policy framework of each country favors an engineering resilience approach to CZM that prioritizes the preservation of expensive and important coastal infrastructure, although each nation has also grafted on ecological preservation considerations pursuant to state (Australia), national, and EU (Finland and the Netherlands) law.
As such, the most important finding of this preliminary study is that, despite deep and pervasive historical legal and policy commitments to an engineering resilience approach to CZM, Australia, Finland, and the Netherlands each show signs of an emerging ecological resilience perspective. In Australia and Finland, both countries that still have relatively large amounts of space, this emergence primarily has taken the initial form of steering
Australian settlement consists of concentrated coastal development in urban areas. Law and policy in smaller coastal urban areas purport to favor a coastal retreat strategy, but in practice to date the overall emphasis continues to be on protecting and armoring shoreline infrastructure. This political reality constrains Australian CZM into an engineering resilience approach, at least in its highly urbanized areas. Property owners expect that they will be able to rebuild in the coastal zone after erosion or storm damage, which reflects an engineering resilience norm that seeks to have coastal communities bounce back to how they were before a disaster. With sea level rise and projections of more intense storm events, however, Australia will inevitably have to alter its approach to CZM, and some signs of this needed shift in CZM approach are appearing in New South Wales and Victorian state legislation and the approaches of smaller municipalities. Thus, at least some coastal managers in Australia appear to be adopting a perspective that acknowledges the dynamic nature of social-ecological systems, a nascent ecological resilience approach to CZM.
In Finland, CZM focuses on land use and flood risk planning that also has its roots in an engineering resilience approach. Government officials generally cannot re-evaluate existing development in coastal zones in light of new information (legal finality). Thus, current CZM in Finland leaves little room for adaptation to rising sea levels and flooding in developed areas; as a result, CZM instead must rely on coastal armoring to protect existing structures. Even so, as in Australia, there are signs that social-ecological resilience is seeping into Finland's CZM. Laws restrict new development in coastal zones, resulting in most new development occurring inland and freeing undeveloped coastal areas to adapt to changing conditions. Finland is also experimenting with nature-based solutions, such as using existing wetlands for flood protection, and with increasing the amount of unpaved coastal urban areas, again strengthening the ability of coastal areas to adapt to changing conditions, such as increased flood risk.
The Netherlands literally has the least space of the three nations studies to absorb change and to adapt to changing conditions, as well as the strongest absolute social need to preserve coastal stability. Because ~65% of the country's population already resides in flood prone areas, with a significant percentage of the country already below sea level, Dutch CZM is, unsurprisingly, characterized by engineered flood defenses of dikes and canals combined with large protected coastal areas designed to “freeze” the coastal system in a static state. This quintessentially engineering resilience approach to dealing with coastal system dynamics has been baked into Dutch culture and law for centuries.
Even in the Netherlands, however, ecological resilience approaches are emerging, albeit always subordinate to the overarching goal of coastal stability, an approach that some researchers have dubbed “Building with Nature” (Van Slobbe et al.,
Beyond their individual trajectories, these three nations' approaches to CZM also suggest that the initial binary that this article proposed, contrasting an engineering resilience approach and an ecological resilience approach to CZM, in fact represents less of a dichotomy for coastal law and policy than a malleable ensemble of tools and strategies. In other words, the two approaches to CZM are not (entirely) mutually exclusive, and legal evolution can allow for the progressive emergence of an ecological resilience approach (see also Cheong et al.,
However, the analysis of these three countries also suggests that legal and policy options for CZM will always be constrained by the physical realities of a particular coastal nation. The fact that sea-level rise is not a significant concern for large stretches of Finland's coast effectively gives Finland far more flexibility in its CZM approach than either Australia or the Netherlands will be able to tolerate. Essentially, climate change imposes less pressure on Finland to evolve its laws to an ecological resilience approach than it imposes on the Netherlands or, at the end of this extreme, disappearing Pacific island nations, simply because Finland's land mass is still responding to the retreat of ice-age glaciers.
As we stated at the beginning of this article, the goal of this research project was not just to compare CZM approaches in Australia, Finland, and the Netherlands but, more importantly, to demonstrate the value of comparative law research in the study of law's role in promoting social-ecological resilience to changing environmental conditions. As limited in scope as this study is, our comparative analysis of these three countries already suggests several fruitful focal points for future research. For example, the realization that all three countries—admittedly, to different degrees—already deploy ecological resilience strategies and techniques within an overall CZM legal framework that privileges engineering resilience raises several important questions regarding the extent to which nations can and do blend these two approaches and whether blending evolves eventually into an ecological resilience-based approach to CZM. Research assembling a variety of case studies and documenting exactly how coastal law and policy are evolving in a variety of nations could thus provide important contributions to global CZM in the Anthropocene.
The realization that physical realities remain important factors in shaping a particular nation's CZM law and policy also suggests productive avenues for interdisciplinary research. Specifically, our initial three case studies suggest that the disciplines of legal geography and historical geography have important roles to play in investigating the intersection of resilience theory and CZM and in formulating effective future CZM law for individual nations.
More generally, a proposition to be tested in future research is whether coastal nations typically begin with an engineering resilience approach to CZM (and, indeed, to their environmental laws more broadly). Our three case studies are insufficient to discern, for example, whether this approach is globally typical, or is found mostly in European-derived government systems, or is found mostly in developed nations, or even is idiosyncratic to the three countries we happened to study (plus the United States). We also have not focused on whether the hard engineering approaches pre-dated CZM law and policy (i.e., law and policy reflect a reality that already existed) or occurred outside the law (i.e., CZM
A final consideration worthy of more comparative investigation is the fact that legal systems have different capacities to innovate within their CZM strategies based on factors such as enforcement mechanisms, flexibility in law, the rate of statutory change, and the role of litigation. For example, some legal systems already embrace doctrines that can be harnessed to promote the adaptation and evolution of CZM. In common-law systems derived from England and British colonialism (including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, plus extensive influence on various African and South American nations), concepts of public and private nuisance, trespass, negligence and strict liability, and in some, public trust, provide mechanisms for evolving natural resources law and policy (Rechtschaffen and Antolini,
This example also highlights the potential importance of subnational governance, a factor present to some degree in all three countries studies here. Those local, regional and state levels often have greater capacity to innovate because they can provide greater capacity for stakeholder engagement and an appropriate scale for experimental management approaches (Charnley et al.,
Clearly, different legal framings of resilience in the coastal zone have important implications for future coastal social-ecological resilience in the face of accelerating environmental change (Clarvis et al.,
All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
The findings and conclusions in this manuscript have not been formally disseminated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and should not be construed to represent any agency determination or policy.
1State of New South Wales,
2State of Victoria,
3