Washington Coastal Zone Management Program enhancement

Natural hazard threats are a growing reality for everyone working, living, or visiting our invaluable, dynamic shoreline areas. Community resilience to coastal hazards is an emerging national priority, and we are using this opportunity to bolster our capacity to help coastal communities in Washington. Our enhancement goal supports a comprehensive and collaborative effort to help communities understand and evaluate risk; provide tailored planning assistance and guidance to support relevant policy and regulatory decisions; and develops training to build skills and best practices.

We work in partnership with local governments to protect and manage shorelines. State shoreline management regulations were updated in 2003 to ensure, at a minimum, no net loss of ecological functions necessary to sustain shoreline natural resources.
 
Over the past decade, much of our Program Enhancement Grants have been dedicated to working with 133 cities and counties within the coastal zone to comprehensively update their Shoreline Master Program (SMP) policies and regulations. As we near the finish line of comprehensive updates, we are transitioning into developing a systematic approach to understand the efficiency and effectiveness of these programs.

Washington State agencies already manage a number of human activities such as marine transportation, aquaculture, and fishing in marine coastal waters. In partnership with Washington Department of Natural Resources, Ecology is leading a process to plan for the future of our ocean. This is an interagency effort to address a need for integrated and coordinated management.
 
Marine Spatial Planning integrates existing marine resource management and addresses emerging issues and new uses, like renewable energy. Creating a plan now provides an opportunity for all users to have input through a public planning process while determining the most appropriate strategies to manage resources in the future.

We are updating our set of shoreline aerial oblique photographs in the coastal zone and providing user guidance and best practices. These photographs are used across the state for a variety of purposes related to shoreline mapping, evaluation, and beyond.
 
Since the first oblique photos were acquired in the 1970s, Ecology has adapted its methods for contracting, capturing, organizing, and sharing the photos with as broad an audience as possible. We have actively sought feedback and has made numerous changes to our Coastal Zone Management Program, including improving the quality and resolution of the photos and better integrating them with our Coastal Atlas.
 
One of the objectives of our 2015-2017 project was to reassess methods for both acquiring photos and making them readily accessible. We spoke to a wide range of users in a variety of different sectors in order to better understand how they used the photos and what they would like to see improved. The Washington Oblique Aerial Photography report summarizes our findings.