Table of Contents
Author(s)
Jim Blackburn
Baker Institute Rice Faculty Scholar | Professor in the Practice of Environmental LawTo access the full paper, download the PDF on the left-hand sidebar.
By Jim Blackburn, Henk Mooiweer, Elizabeth Winston Jones, Megan Parks and Frances Kellerman
Introduction
The Texas Coastal Exchange (TCX) is a concept developed by the Severe Storm Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center at Rice University under a grant from the Houston Endowment. The TCX was conceived as a nonstructural hurricane surge damage reduction concept in which landowners who restore natural areas to provide certain ecological protection services receive compensation through a voluntary market exchange. Over time, this concept has emerged as a mechanism to address several of the most important issues of the early twenty-first century, including flood damage mitigation, water quantity and quality enhancement, climate change, and fish and wildlife conservation, as well as a means to provide economic resilience in both the farm and ranch community and the oil and gas industry. In short, restoring natural systems through the creation of a voluntary private sector market may enable major progress in addressing several key present-day issues and spearhead major strides toward a circular macroeconomic system that will be required for the future.
The idea for the TCX emerged from observations of aerial flyovers of the flooded areas east of Galveston Bay after Hurricane Ike as well as the plan prepared for the Bolivar Peninsula post-Ike. These flyovers showed that hurricane surge water came ashore with Ike, pouring off of the low-lying coastal plain and wetlands back into the Gulf of Mexico several days after Ike made landfall. From this aerial view and subsequent computer modeling, it became clear that this low-lying coastal plain stored vast quantities of surge water without incurring the massive damages experienced elsewhere on the coast. Further, the post-Ike report from Bolivar indicated that landowners from low-lying wetlands and prairies on the bay side of the peninsula were interested in generating additional sources of income. These two observations led the SSPEED Center team to search for ways in which to store surge water and generate income for landowners, resulting in the TCX concept.
Over the past two years, the project team has been investigating innovative concepts to generate income for landowners of approximately 2 million acres of low-lying coastal prairie, wetlands, and woodlots with a goal of either storing or attenuating hurricane surge flooding. This in turn led the project team to investigate several different types of natural systems, including oyster reefs, coastal wetlands, coastal prairies, and bottomland hardwoods, as well as specialty habitat creation options. The initial area of interest was the approximately 2 million acres of land at or below the 20-foot elevation contour adjacent to the bay and/or Gulf in Chambers, Galveston, Brazoria, and Matagorda counties, as shown in Figure 1. This 20-foot elevation was chosen because it represents the current reasonable worst-case hurricane surge along the coast (i.e., without considering future sea level rise or increasing storm intensity). This geographic area could provide a significant buffer for the rest of the region. However, given the strong negative perception of new regulation, our team concluded that this buffer can only be (rapidly) established through market-based mechanisms. The TCX is such a mechanism.
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