The Nature Conservancy in North Carolina - Climate Change in North Carolina--Responding to Rising Seas

With your help, we can reduce the impacts of climate change on our lives, on our environment and on future generations.

The Nature Conservancy Tackles Climate Change

The Nature Conservancy is joining with policy makers, community members, businesses, scientists, industry leaders and others to slow the pace of climate change. Learn more about the global problem and local solutions.

Restoring Reefs, Reducing Impacts

Building artificial reefs from recycled oyster shells in North Carolina

In North Carolina, one way to reduce coastal energy from rising sea levels is to build oyster reefs to buffer wave action and slow currents. Reefs are made from marl (clay and calcium carbonate) and from recycled oyster shells. Oysters on these reefs have grown faster and larger than expected, and other animals use the artificial reefs as habitat.

When the sea rises just a few inches in some parts of the world, flooding will extend far inland.

High-resolution models developed for The Nature Conservancy show that up to 469,000 acres of low-lying lands on the Albemarle Peninsula could be flooded by as little as a 12-inch increase in sea level. The current rate of sea-level rise in the Albemarle Peninsula is two inches every decade.

Local Solutions to a Global Problem

The Nature Conservancy is studying the anticipated impacts of climate change on several ecosystems like the Albemarle Peninsula and how those places will respond. From this information, we can develop the tools and long-term conservation strategies that address a place’s adaptation to a changing climate.

On the Albemarle Peninsula, water is as much a part of the landscape as the land itself. Extending into the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary like a great outstretched hand, the peninsula is so low and flat that water and earth have mingled to form a diverse landscape of lush swamp forests, nearly impenetrable pocosin bogs, broad bands of fresh and brackish marshes and languid blackwater creeks and rivers.

More than 540,000 acres on the peninsula have been placed in conservation, and millions of dollars in state, federal and private funds have been invested in land acquisition and other conservation activities.

But now, partly due to global climate change, sea level is rising in North Carolina at such a rate–and land along the coast is subsiding–that water actually threatens the Albemarle Peninsula’s ecosystems and its most important conservation lands. Even without actual inundation, the peninsula could be altered by increased erosion, saltwater intrusion, a rising water table and disintegration of the region’s peat soils. A warming climate also could lead to shifts in species distribution and vegetation, invasions of non-native species and an increase in the incidence of fire.

With an eye on the future, The Nature Conservancy has begun working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other partners to develop long-term management strategies at the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge and elsewhere on the peninsula. We are working to understand which strategies will contribute most to the resilience of wetland ecosystems on the peninsula and to the stability of the

peninsula’s large deposits of carbon-rich peat soils. In doing so, we hope to give these ecosystems time to adapt to a future much different than today.

Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): albemarle sound at sunset © Jodie Lapoint/TNC; depositing bagged oyster shells in the sound © Aaron McCall/TNC; dumping marl to build new oyster reefs/TNC.