Towards principles and policy levers for advancing living shorelines

Living shorelines are often better alternatives to stabilize shorelines and reduce dangerous erosion compared to traditional hard armoring practices such as bulkheads and seawalls. Increasing the use of living shorelines will require policy innovation and new approaches to shoreline management, however. Informed by a comparative legal analysis, this article identifies "policy levers" through four categories that demonstrate critical aspects of the human dimension in the estuarine management context that, to greater and lesser extents, promote or inhibit the implementation of living shorelines. Specifically, these categories include: erosion and flood control; neighboring stabilization structures; rebuild policies and sea-level rise projections; and jurisdictional boundaries. The article concludes that the policy levers that are the most optimal baseline choices to advance living shorelines include prohibiting shoreline stabilization in areas where erosion is controlled and bank loss mitigated; eliminating hard armoring as the default erosion and flood control stabilization preference; prohibiting "gap-filling" policies that connect or "align" existing, legal seawalls or armoring; requiring living shorelines in areas where a minimum percentage (10-25%) of the tidal shoreline is already armored; and requiring the replacement of hard armoring with living shorelines when repair is required or certain sea-level rise projections are met. Because modeling frameworks incorporating policy simulations would allow coastal scientists and managers to better visualize how and to what extent policy choices advance or inhibit the adoption of living shorelines, identifying and understanding such policy levers is a critical first step to utilize modeling frameworks to simulate and evaluate how certain legal regimes either promote or inhibit the use of living shorelines for shoreline stabilization in estuarine environments.