By Ashton Bailey, US Environmental Policy Student
The United States Gulf Coast, spanning 1,680 miles across five states (not considering the thousands of miles of inlets and tidal rivers), is truly one-of-a-kind.[1] From an energy production standpoint, both onshore and offshore, this region is home to over 48% of domestic petroleum refining capacity and 51% of domestic natural gas processing capacity.[2] Gulf Coast fisheries also provide more than 40% of U.S. seafood, accompanied by billions of dollars per year in the fishing and tourism industries.[3] The Gulf, even apart from its economic productivity, has been a supportive host of humanity for over 14,500 years, dating back to the Clovis civilization in Florida.[4] With a wetland area of five million acres, roughly half of the U.S. total, it is no surprise that the Gulf’s coastal wetlands are also the home to integral vegetation, waterfowl, furbearers, and fish species.[5] These wetlands provide a number of ecological services to coastal communities; amongst many other functions, these ecosystems serve as hubs for ecotourism, storm surge buffers, and water purification sites, helping to stabilize life for coastal populations.
With so much economic and ecological activity centered around the Gulf Coast, how do we improve the resilience of these areas? Is it even possible to balance industrial vitality with resilient management systems? Though the issue is complex and seemingly looms larger with every decade, I believe that Gulf Coast communities can adapt to their changing environment and become equipped to better withstand coastal flooding.
A function of both its natural geography and its value to human development, the Gulf Coast sits in a uniquely vulnerable position to coastal flooding. More than 7,000 square miles of the region sit at elevations of only a few feet above sea level, including the major urban hubs of Houston and New Orleans which house integral interstate, port, and rail infrastructure.[6] With a population that has grown to over 14 million, at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the country, the wetland acreage mentioned above has been shrinking to provide more land for a growing economy.[7] This region has long been susceptible to tropical cyclones that, in tandem with increasing rates of sea level rise, wreak havoc on coastal communities.
The vulnerability of the Gulf Coast is not distributed equitably, though. After Hurricane Harvey, for example, a study of flooding extent in the Greater Houston area showed more extensive flooding at non-Hispanic Black home sites and at sites of lower socioeconomic status.[8] The racial and economic disparity of flood impacts could also be seen, with a clarity likely not exceeded by any other event, in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Even prior to landfall, levee maintenance had severely lacked in the city’s low-income and predominantly Black neighborhoods, particularly in the Lower Ninth Ward.[9] After the levees had failed and 80% of the city had been submerged, Black residents received $8,000 less in government aid, on average, than white homeowners, resulting in unsafe or impossible living conditions for months—or longer; in 2019, fourteen years after the storm, the population of the Lower Ninth Ward had shrunk from 14,000 to 4,000.[10]
Ingleside on the Bay (IOB), located in the Coastal Bend Region of Texas, is a community that reflects much of the difficulty in building resilience on the Gulf Coast. About a third of the city is located in the floodplain, some areas designated as High Risk-Coastal Areas with over a 1% chance of seeing annual flooding.[11] Directly east of the city is the Enbridge Ingleside Energy Center, the largest crude oil export terminal in North America, and directly north of the city is Cheniere’s Corpus Christi Liquefaction Facility, the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas in the U.S.[12] During the 2020 hurricane season, IOB experienced, to some extent, eight tropical storms and hurricanes. That year, members of the Ingleside on the Bay Costal Watch Association (IOBCWA) joined the Coastal Alliance to Protect Our Environment (CAPE), a network of over 20 organizations like IOBCWA which advocate against industrial development that impacts life in the Coastal Bend. IOBCWA and other community efforts have successfully secured funding from San Patricio County for increased research into ship wake flooding, sea level rise, and drainage. This progress, coupled with the organization’s engagement in the planning process via workshops and education events, indicates the city has made efforts to expand its resilience. Still, there are shortcomings in these efforts. Bezboruah et al. (2024) analyzed the adaptive and institutional capacity of IOBCWA, exposing areas that require improvement.[13] Though the findings of some of IOBCWA’s studies—connecting industrialization to increased coastal flooding—had been mentioned in the creation of IOB City Council general plans, these plans did not suggest any actual limitations for industrial development. While IOBCWA itself has championed mitigation strategies, conducting cost benefit analyses for infrastructure protecting against flooding, the community still does not have someone to advocate for implementation among the region’s elected officials.
Extrapolating the successes of IOBCWA in expanding awareness and initiating local policy efforts to the Gulf Coast as a whole is easier said than done. Differences (and sometimes competition) between state governments make widescale adoption of a central resilience framework difficult, at least at a pace required by the changing climate. Still, I believe that the little victories in places like Ingleside on the Bay can accumulate. IOBCWA’s emphasis on community engagement has brought the resident to the forefront of issues that threaten their future, making evidence-based planning efforts feel more intimate. IOBCWA has also demonstrated the ability for smaller community-based organizations to institute local change while also partnering with other entities, such as CAPE, to gain influence and stoke regional change. Other communities should look to the framework constructed by IOBCWA for evidence that small, resident-led efforts should not be discredited, but embraced.
[1] National Aeronautics and Space Administration, “Gulf Coast of the United States,” Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, January 8, 2020, https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/individual.php?db_date=2020-01-08
[2] U.S. Energy Information Administration, Gulf of America Fact Sheet, September 4, 2024, https://www.eia.gov/special/gulf_of_america/
[3] Environmental Defense Fund, Gulf of Mexico, May 29, 2015, https://www.edf.org/sustainable-fishing/gulf-mexico
[4] J.J. Halligan et al., “Pre-Clovis occupation 14,550 years ago at the Page-Ladson Site, Florida, and the peopling of the Americas,” Science Advances 2, no. 5 (May 2016), https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.1600375?rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed&url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org
[5] Environmental Protection Agency, Gulf of America, February 5, 2025, https://www.epa.gov/gulfofamerica/why-it-important-protect-gulf-america
[6] The Nature Conservancy, “Gulf of Mexico,” Coastal Resilience, https://coastalresilience.org/project/gulf-of-mexico/
[7] U.S. Census Bureau, “Emergency Management Coastal Areas,” October 28, 2024, https://www.census.gov/topics/preparedness/about/coastal-areas.html
[8] Timothy W. Collins, Sara E. Grineski, Jayajit Chakraborty, Aaron B. Flores, “Environmental injustice and Hurricane Harvey: A household-level study of socially disparate flood exposures in Greater Houston, Texas, USA,” Environmental Research 179, Part A (December 2019), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935119305699#sec4
[9] Jean Ait Belkhir and Christiane Charlemaine, “Race, Gender and Class Lessons from Hurricane Katrina,” Race, Gender & Class 14, no. 1/2 (2007), 120–52, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41675200.
[10] Dayana Sarkisova, “In a New Orleans ward ravaged by climate change, leaders nurture the next generation,” The Washington Post, August 2, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2022/new-orleans-lower-ninth-ward-climate-csed/
[11] Karabi Bezboruah et al., “Building adaptive capacity to address coastal flooding: The case of a small Texas City,” Environmental Science & Policy 151 (January 2024), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901123002484
[12] Rithika Krishna and Rod Nickel, “Enbridge buys N. America’s biggest oil export hub in $3-bln Moda deal,” Reuters, September 7, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/enbridge-buy-moda-midstream-operating-3-billion-2021-09-07/
[13] Karabi Bezboruah et al., “Building adaptive capacity to address coastal flooding”