The election of another new governor in 2016 — Roy Cooper, a pro-environment Democrat — has begun to reverse the shift in the state’s tenor on environmental issues. For one thing, Governor Cooper reappointed Mr. Emory to the coastal commission over the summer. Even so, the legislature remains in Republican hands. Robin Smith, a new appointee to the commission who served for years as an environmental lawyer for the state, said that, “based on the legislature’s approach to other environmental issues in the interim, I suspect there’s a high degree of suspicion, bordering on hostility, still, to new regulation based on sea level rise.” Instead, she said, she expects the commission to concentrate on supplying information and working with county and local governments. Ms. Smith said her first meeting with the commission, scheduled for next week, had been canceled because of the storm. While North Carolina has come under criticism for the law, the state has also been home to some of the nation’s most advanced coastal science. The leading scientific model used to forecast storm surge and its effect on coastal areas, known as Adcirc, was created in large part by Rick Luettich, director of the institute of marine sciences at the University of North Carolina. In a telephone interview during a break from boarding up the windows of his home in Morehead City, on the coast, Mr. Luettich noted that before 2012, the state pursued progressive policies that put it in the forefront of coastal management. When the legislature pushed back against the clear scientific evidence underlying climate change, he said, “it came as a shock.” There is a lesson in that, he said. “The process of converting scientific research into policy is one that we take for granted at times,” Mr. Luettich said. “What we learned is that you can’t take that for granted. We need to have a closer dialogue with policymakers, to make sure we’re on the same page.”
The 2010 H.B. 819 law in the US state of North Carolina, currently braced for the impact of Hurricane Florence, effectively ordered local agencies to adopt coastal policies that ignored scientific models indicating an acceleration in sea level rises, according to an article in the New York Times. A 2012 report estimated that sea levels could rise by up to 39 inches by 2100. However, some business interests argued that the results could not be validated and that their use in policy decisions could have “a negative impact on coastal economies”.