Restored and Natural Wetlands: Flood Mitigation in the Climate Change Era

Keywords: ecosystem services, wetlands, disaster mitigation, natural capital
Abstract Type: Poster Abstract

Abstract

As the most common and costly natural disaster in the world, increased flooding promises to be
one of the most catastrophic effects of climate change on human societies. Wetlands, both coastal and inland, play an integral role in flood mitigation by soaking up water during flood events and releasing it during dry periods. Policies such as mitigation banking—the restoration or creation of wetlands in one location compensating for degradation in another—attempt to correct for the loss of wetland ecosystem services by implementing an offset system. Restorative projects compensate for some losses in benefits, but natural wetlands have been shown to provide a more diverse wealth of ecological functions. My work addresses this policy question in two parts: 1) in the continental United States, how do disaster mitigation benefits of existing natural wetlands compare to restored wetlands, and what is their contribution to total natural capital and 2) what is the geographic distribution of these benefits in the present and how will that shift in the future due to climate change? I will use a fixed-effects panel analysis regression approach, which will examine the causal effects of heavy rainfall on National Flood Insurance Protection (NFIP) claims. I will then add a spatial weights matrix to address geographic patterns. I will run this model on future precipitation data to estimate the change in extreme rainfall days in the future and the corresponding benefits of retaining natural wetlands as an adaptation strategy for future climate change.