Charleston residents can share concerns about climate change during a listening session at 4:30 p.m. Feb. 21 at the Avery Research Center at the College of Charleston.
The Friday session is one in a series of meetings organized by the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor to assess how a changing global atmosphere affects homeowners and farmers in the coastal region of the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida.
There’s also another session planned for 9 a.m. Saturday during the International Gullah Geechee and African Diaspora (IGGAD) community day conference at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, officials said.
Common theme: Flooding
Flooding has been the consistent concern raised at listening sessions in Georgia and North Carolina, said Erica Xavier-Beauvoir, the corridor’s resiliency manager.
“Everybody is talking about standing water and not being able to have access to major roads during storms and hurricanes,” she told the Charleton City Paper.
Older homeowners said they’ve witnessed how areas that didn’t flood in the 1960s now hold water, and they are not able to use those spaces, she said.
Wildlife refuge managers and farmers who grow food crops, sweetgrass and herbs “talk about flooding and a need for innovative approaches to create sustainability,” she said.
A four-state tour
A $500,000 five-year grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration funds the four-state listening tour.
The project’s aim is to connect homeowners and farmers with flood mitigation options developed by The Nature Conservancy in South Carolina, the National Audubon Society and the South Carolina Aquarium.
Some long-term solutions include restoration of oyster beds and increasing the biodiversity of marshlands and introducing growers to vertical farming techniques.
Many of these efforts are underway in the corridor that stretches from Wilmington, N.C., to St. Augustine Florida. But this project, said Xavier-Beauvoir, will help the nonprofit environmental groups connect with more homeowners and farmers.
Djuanna Brockington, the corridor’s interim-executive director, said information collected during the listening tour will go into “a resilience plan that is specific to the concerns and the needs of Gullah Geechee people.
“Each state in our corridor has their own resilience plan, but none of that actually calls out specific concerns of the Gullah Geechee folks,” she said.
“Gullah Geechee people on the sea islands are often among the first to be affected by sea level rise or hurricanes,” Brockington said. “Then when you add [commercial] development, which affects the natural flow of water, that worsens the impact.”
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