The Adaptors

Florida can do precious little to decrease the pace of global carbon emissions and whatever level of climate change comes from them. Florida’s carbon dioxide emissions from all sectors and all fuels peaked 20 years ago at 260 million metric tons, according to the U.S. Energy Administration. In 2022, the most recent year for which data are available, emissions from Florida were down to 231 million. The following year, China alone grew its emissions by more than double Florida’s total output.

That leaves Florida to adapt. It has long experience with sea level rise. The sea has been rising for 18,000 years since the last glacier cycle peak. Of late, the pace has increased. The Florida Institute of Technology’s Gary Zarillo, who researches the impacts of sea level rise on coastal stability, says sea levels along Florida and the Southeast have risen approximately 1 centimeter per year since about 2006 for a total of 0.65 feet. That’s triple the long-term rates recorded at tidal gauges at Key West, Mayport and other Florida sites. He says the question is whether this is an enduring acceleration or a cycle of rapid rise followed by a fall as was seen in the 1940s and 1970s. Meanwhile, while rainfall varies by Florida region, there have been cases of heavier rains.

Either way, it’s more water. The good news: The protections Floridians build for hurricanes — like constructing buildings to withstand several feet of storm surge — also should offer some protection against sea level rise itself. Here are adaptations Floridians are making and the developers, researchers and public servants across the state leading the way.

Developer Alan Ojeda walked Miami’s Brickell financial district after Hurricane Wilma in 2005 and found glass from blownout windows everywhere, including on top of One Broadway, a 36-story apartment building his Rilea Group recently finished. The glass came from a taller building nearby. 

Ojeda set out to make his next project, a 35-story, 586,000-sq.-ft. office tower next to One Broadway, the strongest, most resilient tower around. Construction on 1450 Brickell began in 2007 and continued through the financial crisis to open in 2010. The lobby is elevated to preserve it from flooding. All the windows going up 500 feet to the roof, not just the first 30 feet as required by code, are made to withstand large missile impact. (Code requires large missile impact resistance up to 30 feet and small-missile impact resistance above that.) The curtainwall structure, according to an Urban Land Institute case study, can withstand winds up to 300 mph. In addition to the standard 2,200-kilowatt generator to power elevators and such in a power outage, there’s a second, 2,000-kilowatt generator so that air-conditioning and lights and computers — and by extension, tenants — can work for a week until diesel is replenished or the power comes back. Ojeda also added energy conservation measures to make it LEED Gold certified.

All in, Ojeda says, the resiliency measures probably added $24 million to the project cost. But in return, he says, the building rents upon opening started at $44 a square foot when the going rate on Brickell was $35. “I think it was worth it. Number one, for commanding higher rents, but also to bring high-quality tenants very fast,” Ojeda says. The LEED measures cut the power bill by $900,000 annually. The building location also was a factor, he says, in occupancy and rent income success. At the south gateway of Brickell’s commercial area, the building is, for Miami, relatively easily accessible by car from north, west and south and is near a stop for the Metromover, the free, automated downtown people mover.

Miami is often tagged as ground zero for climate impacts. Ojeda, who intends to keep building here, notes that Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida but ground zero for devastation also was inland Georgia and the Carolinas. Nonetheless, Ojeda would like to see Florida do more about resiliency. “Miami should be in the forefront of those things. If we call ourselves global, then let’s be global in the front of doing things.”

The Clearwater Beach project will sit 18.6 feet above FEMA’s base flood elevation — well above FEMA’s 12-foot standard for the area and matching Pinellas’ standard. (Base flood elevation is the point to which water is expected to rise during a “base flood,” sometimes described as a 1-in-100- year flood.)

The concrete building’s exterior and glazing will meet code requirements to withstand Category 5 winds, Freedman says. The first floor will be designed for storm surge to pass through. Living units start on the second floor.

“There needs to be a focus on adapting,” Freedman says.

Construction on the $250-million project will start late this year and be completed in 24 to 26 months. Units will range from 2,000 to 5,500 square feet, with prices from $2 million to $10 million.

When first conceived, the developers expected a fifth of the units to be sold to in-market buyers. Post-Helene and post-Milton, they now expect that proportion to double. “There’s a flight to quality,” Freedman says.

The city’s 2023 Tidal Barrier Ordinance is one adaptation the “Venice of America” is making. The city is also spending more than $1 billion on water system and stormwater system projects. It’s hard to attribute how much spending, private and public, is routine, albeit expensive, major upkeep and how much owes to adapting to sea level rise or heavier rains.

In passing the seawall law, the city followed a mandate from Broward County that all coastal municipalities require higher seawalls to answer projections of sea level rise for the next half century, projections driven by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study. (Notably, before 2016, the city focused not on minimum heights but on restricting maximum seawall heights — so that owners didn’t block neighbors’ views or create concrete canyons.) The 2023 ordinance requires the seawall to be raised to five feet high if an owner is cited for flooding neighbors or the public right-of- way, or if a seawall is more than 50% in need of repair or for new seawall construction. The expectation is that as existing seawalls over time reach the end of their 50-year useful lives, new, five-foot walls will replace them making homes on the city’s waterways resilient. As sea level rise projections change, the height requirement can change with them.

As of November, the city had cited approximately 50 property owners for seawall issues. “There’s things we can do in the public realm, but there’s things that have to happen in the private realm as well in order for us to be as resilient a community as we can be,” says city resilience officer Nancy Gassman.

The price of a new seawall is $1,000 to $2,000 per linear foot. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows it will cost property owners $1.7 billion to $3.5 billion to replace all the seawalls along the city’s 165 miles of waterway. But much of the cost would come regardless of sea-level change. One costly item that does result from higher seas: Elevating lots as the groundwater table rises.

Meanwhile, those who can’t pay to get their walls to five feet are finding buyers hungry for waterfront. “It’s very common for people when they buy these houses as teardowns, that they elevate the seawall as part of the new construction,” Gassman says.

The city, meanwhile, has had plenty of its own adaptation work to do. It spent $1 million on one seawall to protect a city park and adjacent road and nearly $3 million to replace four seawalls on Las Olas Boulevard. It installed 200 tidal valves to keep ocean water from flowing back up the stormwater system and onto streets. It wants to put in another 200 tidal valves at $3,000 to $15,000 a pop.

Some of the adaptations are necessitated by heavier rains or higher seas — pumps to move stormwater when gravity formerly did the trick, for example. But other work owes to infrastructure aging out or to accommodate development. An under-construction $666-million water treatment plant replaces one at the end of its useful life that wasn’t built to Category 5 hurricane standards and can’t treat for what are known as forever chemicals.

Reefs also are famously in peril, stressed by warmer and rising water and acidification that renders coral susceptible to disease. Reefs in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary saw a 50% reduction in coral cover just from 1998 to 2011.

In a case of doing well by doing good, scientists are finding ways to adapt Florida’s sickly 350-mile coral reef to become stronger and more resilient — much as agricultural researchers create hardier strains of food crops to withstand disease or thrive in new areas where previously they didn’t grow. Researchers from the Florida Aquarium in Tampa and the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science last year collected coral DNA from a specific spot in Honduras, where corals have thrived in warm temperatures, to crossbreed with Florida coral and then plant the new, more resilient strain in Florida waters.

In December, the UM school, Nova Southeastern University and nine Florida institutions announced they won a $16-million federal grant to form a network to share resources and best practices to help newly restored corals survive climate impacts. The project will take place from Palm Beach to the Keys and involves crossbreeding and also selective breeding of corals that survived a 2023 bleaching event.

“By enhancing coral resilience, this project will contribute to coastal protection efforts in South Florida, highlighting the invaluable role of healthy reefs in safeguarding urban infrastructure from flooding and erosion,” says Andrew Baker, the lead of the project and a professor in the Department of Marine Biology and Ecology and director of the Coral Reef Futures Lab at the Rosenstiel School. 

How much transplanting coral can scale is an open question. “This is very labor-intensive kind of work,” says Professor Joshua Feingold of Nova Southeastern University. Nova in 2012 opened a $50-million Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Ecosystems Research.

Coral, meanwhile, are spreading north on their own as warming water extends their range. Feingold has observed certain coral become more abundant off Broward than in decades past. And coral in the relatively cooler waters of Broward seem to be doing better than those in the Keys.

While adapting for rising seas in some cases just adds a percentage to the cost of routine infrastructure work, in others it’s just plain expensive. The Florida Keys shows adaptation is as much a funding challenge as an engineering one.

The Florida Keys are low-lying — most of the area is less than five feet above sea level — environmentally fraught and a very expensive place to get certain work done. There’s a dearth of contractors able to do road projects in the lower Keys.

A consultant’s study in 2021 helped form a priority list for addressing 155 miles of county roads at risk for inundation by 2045. Price tag at the time: $1.8 billion. Raising the roads themselves is the cheap part of the job. The biggest slice of the cost pie is stormwater infrastructure — pumps and injection wells so that higher roads don’t simply dump runoff onto homes, businesses, the Florida Straits and Florida Bay. That $1.8 billion, by the way, doesn’t count municipal roads or U.S. 1, the Overseas Highway. A separate study is ongoing for city roads.

Monroe punches above its weight in securing federal and state grants and, with the consultant study in hand, went after state Resilient Florida grant money. County Chief Resilience Officer Rhonda Haag can run through each of the road projects and their grants awarded. But estimated costs, as happened with the Sands on Big Pine Key, haven’t matched bids. Few projects have started, and none is complete. The $1.8 billion, with inflation, now will be more like $3 billion.

It’s not a sum the county will find under the couch cushions. Haag points out the county also needs to fund libraries, firefighting, law enforcement and other services. “We don’t have a lot of extra cash lying around,” she says.

Meanwhile, “every year, we get more and more notifications of inundation further, lasting longer and deeper,” Haag says. “There are going to be areas we start losing as sea level rises.”