Newport adopts Oregon Coast’s first new estuary management plan in decades

Newport is the first city on the Oregon Coast to adopt a new estuary management plan in more than 40 years.

The city jointly manages the Yaquina Bay Estuary with Lincoln County and the city of Toledo. The three entities use the plan to determine what kind of development can happen in what parts of the estuary.

The updated version requires developers to perform climate vulnerability assessments for all projects in the estuary. It also includes a commitment from Newport city leaders to revisit the plan and update it periodically as the estuary faces new climate impacts, such as rising sea levels and warming ocean temperatures.

Annie Merrill is the estuaries and ocean manager for the Oregon Shores Conservation Coalition. She joins us to talk more about estuaries and the risks they face in a changing climate.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Newport is the first city on the Oregon Coast to adopt a new estuary management plan in more than four decades. The updated version requires developers to perform climate vulnerability assessments for all projects in the Yaquina Bay Estuary. It also includes a commitment from Newport city leaders to revise and revisit the plan and update it periodically, as the estuary faces new climate impacts.

Annie Merrill is the estuaries and ocean manager for the Oregon Shores Conservation Coalition. She joins us now. It’s good to have you on Think Out Loud.

Annie Merrill: Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Miller: What is an estuary?

Merrill: An estuary is essentially a coastal body of water where fresh water from the rivers meets saltwater from the ocean.

Miller: What makes these places special and important?

Merrill: They are essentially places of transition between freshwater systems and the marine environment, so they are incredibly biodiverse and productive habitats. They’re actually one of the most important coastal ecosystems for supporting biodiversity and community livelihoods. They offer a range of ecosystem services that directly benefit both people and wildlife. They filter water heading to the ocean from the watershed, they provide nursery habitat for a variety of juvenile fish and shellfish.  These estuary habitats also support marine and terrestrial wildlife of all kinds. So they’re biodiversity hotspots.

They’re also really important for recreation and tourism industries, and support coastal commercial fisheries. They’re really the backbone of our coastal economies.

Miller: Support commercial fisheries, meaning, people not fishing there necessarily, but that is the place where juvenile fish are growing up before they go out to the open ocean?

Merrill: Yeah, exactly. The habitats found within estuaries are really essential for supporting juvenile fish species and supporting whole marine food webs. But also, the estuaries themselves tend to be really protected, sheltered areas on the coast where big cities have developed, like Newport, Astoria and Coos Bay. And those estuaries are actually home to commercial fishing fleets and marinas that house the commercial fishing industry.

Miller: What kinds of threats do estuaries face right now?

Merrill: Oh, there are so many: degraded water quality from activities in the watershed that can have an impact on sedimentation in our estuaries; climate change is threatening our estuaries by warming waters and creating ocean acidification; also coastal development has long been a threat to our estuaries. Over the past 100 years or so, we’ve really changed the landscape of our estuaries and altered estuary habitat by diking and filling in wetlands, and blocking off tidal flow, which has changed wetland habitat and degraded estuaries in a way that they’re less capable of handling the impacts of climate change, events of flooding and things like that.

Miller: I want to hear more about that in a second. But, if there is development that is essentially on top of and replaces an estuary, can you recreate an estuary somewhere else, or is it just lost?

Merrill: It’s mostly lost. Certainly, restoration does occur and there’s some really great groups that are doing restoration in our estuaries all up and down the coast. But restoration is really challenging on a technical level. Ecologically, oftentimes, restoration projects can’t quite bring an estuary habitat – whether it’s an eelgrass meadow or a wetland – back to its original functioning capacity. So there is a lot that’s lost when an estuary is degraded.

Also, it’s really costly. It’s super expensive to do restoration projects. And any time a blue carbon habitat like a wetland or an eel grass meadow is disturbed, it actually releases a lot of carbon dioxide that can’t necessarily be sequestered again – at least not rapidly, on the scale that we need.

Miller: I want to go back to what you said earlier, because it seems like you’re saying that estuaries are both threatened by climate change, but also can provide resilience in the face of climate change. Did I hear that correctly?

Merrill: Absolutely. This is something I love to talk about, because our estuary ecosystems are globally recognized as essential climate solutions. They offer the first line of defense against many of the impacts of climate change. The habitats within them mitigate floods. Wetlands are essentially sponges that just soak up flood waters and disperse the water in a way that protects infrastructure and other habitats. They buffer storms, thereby protecting infrastructure.

Vegetated habitats within estuaries, like eelgrass, also buffer the impacts of ocean acidification, and they sequester enormous amounts of carbon. I think this is something that a lot of folks don’t realize, but estuary sediments can store carbon at a rate 10 times as quickly as sediments in forests. And if undisturbed, they can store carbon below ground for thousands of years. So this is potentially even more carbon sequestration than our old growth forests.

Miller: We’re talking now because, as I noted at the beginning, recently the city of Newport adopted an update to a more than 40-year-old estuary management plan. In general, what are the old plans like? What was the one for Yaquina Bay?

Merrill: These plans are really old. They were incredibly visionary at the time. I honestly think we wouldn’t have such beautiful functioning estuaries if it weren’t for the adoption of these plans 40 years ago. They really slowed coastal development and made sure to protect a lot of really important estuarine habitats, but they were old. The maps were hand drawn, which is crazy, but for a lot of estuaries in Oregon, those maps are still used to manage resources in the estuaries. And we now have technology like GIS [Geographic Information System]. We have all kinds of new information and data. There’s a lot of really great estuarine research that has occurred in the last 40 years. We know a lot more about climate change and the threats to estuaries, and then again, how estuaries can actually buffer the impacts of climate change.

So, as great as those plans were originally, they really need to be updated to take into account all the changes that have occurred in the past 40 years. There’s a lot of industries that are no longer super relevant or obsolete that were favored in those plans. And it’s really an opportunity to also think about how we want our estuaries to look, and how we want them to be managed going forward, with the threat of climate change.

Miller: What do you see as some of the most important changes in the new management plan that Newport has adopted?

Merrill: It’s really significant, first of all, that this plan was adopted. It was a lot of work on behalf of many local governments, state agencies, tribes and stakeholders over the past several years. And it’s really novel in the fact that it actually considers climate change. There is some great language describing the impacts of climate change to our estuarine environments. There’s the climate impact assessment that was incorporated, that essentially is a buffer for responsible projects to move forward. It basically requires that any new development or any project that occurs in an estuary has to go through a climate impact assessment to determine what threats might impact their project. And that allows decision makers to make more informed decisions about the viability of projects in the long run.

It also incorporated a lot of new information, new data. There’s digital maps. The plan is a lot more user friendly. It identifies new restoration areas and it protects newly restored areas that haven’t been considered in the past 40 years. And again, we’re just excited about the climate language, because this is really novel for estuary management plans on the coast.

Miller: Is it a fair assumption to say that, broadly, this will make it more challenging for someone to develop some kinds of building in an estuary in Yaquina Bay?

Merrill: Not necessarily a building, because buildings aren’t necessarily built on the estuary itself, but on the shorelines. But yeah, if there’s going to be some kind of project, be it a marina or a dock or any kind of development on the water itself, in the estuary, at least the information in the plan is updated. It’s new and relevant, but also the climate change impacts will allow for more informed decision making about whether or not that project might ultimately fail or succumb to sea level rise, for instance. So it definitely provides more information to planners to make informed decisions.

Miller: What was the project like? You mentioned this went on for a number of years and involved a lot of work and a lot of collaboration. I’m wondering if there were any particularly contentious issues that these various stakeholders had to work through to get to this point?

Merrill: I think any time, in any land use planning, estuary planning, coastal planning, there are always a variety of stakeholders that hold different beliefs about what the purpose of resources should be, how things should be managed, to balance development and protection of resources. So certainly, there are areas where some folks wouldn’t necessarily agree, but I think the planning team did a really great job at balancing all of those perspectives, and certainly the city of Newport did a great job at that. And I think that’s just the nature of planning in Oregon.

But the really lovely thing is that everyone had an opportunity to be at the table, to voice their concerns. There were multiple advisory groups that advised the county and the cities on various elements of the plan update, and then it was open for a public comment period as well.

That’s actually something I really want to highlight is, every time these estuary management plans are updated, they’re public processes. And so I encourage coastal communities to get involved when a management plan is updated, so that they can help shape that plan into something that reflects the needs of their community.

Miller: Well, speaking of those other coastal communities, you mentioned Clatsop County to the north, or Coos County to the south. Where do they stand right now, in terms of their own respective estuary management plans?

Merrill: There’s an initiative by the state … the Department of Land Conservation and Development has really made it an initiative to try and update all of these plans. They’ve been supporting local governments in making this happen. But ultimately, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, and local governments all up and down the coast need more resources and support in order to do it. Estuary management plans, the updating process is really expensive and unfortunately, small governments just don’t have the resources financially, or the technical resources to do these updates on their own. So it really needs to be a large effort, pushed by all kinds of partners in the region, and needs to be supported by the community. And then we need financial resources from the governor’s office or the legislature to actually help support these communities in doing the estuary management plan updates.

Coos County is in the process of working through this. They did a bit of an update, it was split into two phases. They had a phase one, where they basically updated all the maps, and did some very basic updates to policies. But phase two is expected to be a much more comprehensive and in-depth update, which is really needed for that community, particularly because there’s a lot of development projects that have their sights on Coos Bay, whether it’s a container terminal or offshore wind. Coos Bay is an area where folks are looking to develop. So it’s really important to make sure that all the most recent data and resource information is incorporated into that plan, so that local communities and decision makers can make good decisions for that estuary. My understanding is the real setback to phase two is the lack of money. So Coos County really needs money to move forward with phase two.

Miller: Annie Merrill, thanks very much for joining us.

Merrill: Thank you so much.

Miller: Annie Merrill is the estuaries and ocean manager for the Oregon Shores Conservation Coalition. And a reminder – a couple of years ago when we spent a week in Coos Bay, we actually spent an afternoon in an estuary there, with an estuarine scientist. You can find that conversation on our website: opb.org/thinkout loud.

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