At some point between February and early March, as seasonal wind and rain hammered New England coasts, a relatively new but enthusiastically embraced tool for predicting erosion slipped off the Federal Emergency Management Agency website.
Pioneered on Nantucket in 2020, the Coastal Erosion Hazard viewer that covered all of New England is now unavailable. It predicted erosion risk across the coast for the years 2030, 2050, and 2100, and until recently was publicly accessible on an online map used by planners and individuals alike.
“The tool was really helpful,” said Leah Hill, Nantucket’s coastal resilience coordinator, “because erosion is episodic. So, an area can be stable for five, 10, 15 years, maybe lose like a foot [of beach] or so, or nothing, and then a storm could come and it could lose a bunch.”
Historical erosion data and flood maps kept by the state are useful, she said, but the FEMA maps incorporated sea level rise to project potential future erosion over time. The Biden administration promoted the tool for homeowners, business owners, and community officials to make resiliency decisions based on erosion concerns.
Hill is acutely aware of climate risks to the small island, which has one of the highest erosion rates in the state. These erosion maps, which resulted in a detailed Nantucket erosion assessment, have become baked into her work to inform residents about their property risks.
“Prospective homeowners or homeowners will call me and say, ‘You know, I’m thinking about purchasing this property. What are the risks associated with it?’” Hill said. “I’ll create, using the best available data, a risk assessment for that property. I don’t give real estate advice, but I can tell them about certain risk criteria. … And in order to do so, I use the FEMA erosion projection maps.”
When Hill went to the site in early March, the page that used to open up the ArcGIS erosion maps instead took her to a login screen with no way to access the maps. When the maps remained inaccessible for weeks, she reached out to the Woods Hole Sea Grant for help connecting with the FEMA Region 1 team, which covers New England, receiving a brief email response on March 24.
“FEMA is currently taking swift action to ensure the alignment with President Trump and Secretary [Kristi] Noem’s direction,” wrote Kerry Bogdan, the risk analysis branch chief at FEMA Region 1. “To that end, FEMA Region 1’s Coastal Erosion Hazard viewer will be unavailable at this time.”
FEMA did not respond to request for comment on the timing or rationale of removing the maps.
Business magazine Fast Company reported that two software engineers were able to save and recreate data from FEMA’s Future Risk Index tool when it, too, quietly vanished in February. The index mapped the projected economic losses from climate change down to the county level, based on hazards like flooding, drought, heat waves, and wildfires under different emissions scenarios.
The FEMA future erosion maps are what’s known as “non-regulatory products,” essentially tools that are designed to be accessible and user-friendly, geared toward communicating information to the public, while regulatory products like FEMA floodplain maps are required by law and determine floodplain management, mitigation, and insurance policy.
For instance, if a building is in a FEMA regulatory floodplain, there may be rules for resiliency improvements. But if a parcel is a long-term future erosion risk, the way to protect it or develop it is often up to the owner’s discretion and informed by the available public information.
“I’m scrambling a little bit,” Hill said. She saved some of the GIS maps, but not all of them, and it isn’t yet clear if the data sets have been saved elsewhere.
The map scrubbing is an abrupt about-face on federal data sets, just six months after the federal government touted them as a way to help people plan for a future in the face of climate change.
Bogdan told The Connecticut Mirror in September 2024 that an assortment of FEMA tools like erosion maps and forward-looking flood risk maps offered critical and helpful insights for municipalities and individuals alike.
“They’re not going to tell you where you can develop, how to develop, what your insurance rate should be, but they are going to convey that hazard risk,” Bogdan said. “What the risk is so people can plan for it.”
Communities have incorporated the erosion map viewer with enthusiasm, she said.
“Some of our severely impacted communities from coastal erosion have really embraced this tool, and they’re incorporating it into their long-term planning for things like grid retreat, placement of utilities, water lines, gas lines, that kind of stuff,” Bogdan told The Mirror.
The Trump administration has, in its first three months, taken steps to roll back policies around climate resiliency planning. On March 25, FEMA announced that it stopped implementing certain floodplain management requirements for federally funded projects.
This Obama-era standard, which was a mechanism for federal agencies to manage risk by requiring federally funded projects to be located out of flood risk areas or constructed to reduce the effects of current and future flood hazards, was halted under the first Trump administration, reinstated by Biden, and is now off again.
“Stopping implementation will reduce the total timeline to rebuild in disaster-impacted communities and eliminate additional costs previously required to adhere to these strict requirements,” the FEMA announcement said in late March.
Last week, FEMA announced that it is ending the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, which has given states and communities billions of dollars to protect against natural disasters. The agency is also canceling all BRIC applications from fiscal years 2020-2023. FEMA said the BRIC program is “more concerned with climate change than helping Americans affected by natural disasters” in a statement announcing the cuts.
There has been no official statement on removing public mapping software that anticipates future flood or erosion risk. Other pages removed include the agency’s 2022 “Guide to Expanding Mitigation: Making the Connection to the Coast,” which supplied emergency managers, community planners, coastal and floodplain managers, and other community stakeholders with resources and ideas to mitigate risk.
A banner atop FEMA’s website reads: “FEMA.gov is being updated to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders. Thank you for your patience and understanding.”
Shannon Hulst, a floodplain and community rating system specialist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Sea Grant and Cape Cod Cooperative Extension, who was able to connect Hill with FEMA Region 1, said ad-hoc data removal is cause for concern.
“It’s disconcerting,” said Hulst, who works on projects like developing flood insurance programs for towns along Cape Cod. “And it certainly can make our jobs more challenging. I know, on our end, we’re working on downloading some of that data to make sure we continue to have access to it.”
In her capacity, Hulst mostly relies on regulatory products like the floodplain maps, which are “a whole different ball game.” There is no word that the flood maps will be taken down, Hulst said, and Massachusetts keeps state-level flood maps as backup.
“We’ll still be OK with that data,” she said of the flood maps, but the disappearance of solid predictive data is an issue for consistent long-term planning. “When we know that there is a risk, and that is what we were using as the best available data to inform us about that risk, and we’re trying to manage our communities to the best of our ability to protect ourselves from that risk,” she said, “it makes it difficult.”
This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
