We Need to Decide Which Beaches to Save — and Which Ones to Abandon

Last December a surprise storm passed through Florida’s Pinellas County, ripping away beaches and wiping out half of the sand dunes from St. Petersburg to Clearwater. The damage was extensive, and all the more painful because the county had just spent about $26 million hauling in sand to build up the dunes after a hurricane had pummeled them in August.

But this turn of events is far from unusual. Beach communities around the world are spending staggering sums replacing sand as big storms and rising seas wash it away. What used to be a maintenance task every 10 years or so is now often an annual event.

For many communities, engineering the beach is worth the hefty price tag to protect properties and tourism. But as climate change hastens beach erosion, trucking or shipping huge quantities of sand to replenish beaches is likely to become economically untenable and logistically impractical. Policymakers may soon have to make painful decisions about which shores and structures to save.

This doesn’t necessarily spell disaster for beach lovers. Beaches were intended to move around, and they’re better off when they do. Unlike other effects of climate change that look bleaker the further into the future you look, migrating beaches could ultimately make America’s coasts healthier by providing coral reefs and wildlife affected by sand replenishment with the habitats they need to thrive.

Beachfront communities have had to maintain the sand on their shorelines ever since beaches became the holiday ideal in the early 20th century. By the mid-1930s waterfront construction in Coney Island, N.Y., Waikiki, Hawaii, and Atlantic City, N.J., had eroded beaches so much that they all had received their first infusions of sand.

The federal government became more involved in the effort in the middle of the 20th century, when protecting American shores from natural disaster became part of the mandate of the Army Corps of Engineers. The agency typically picks up more than half the tab for local beach replenishment projects, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency often steps in when beaches are destroyed by hurricanes.