"Fire Districts" use guards, and one guy pulls a gun to keep people off the beach
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These recent sunny days bring the last chances to access the
Rhode Island coastline before chillier weather sets in, though that won’t
keep Jesse Reiblich away.
When he’s not in or around the water — as an avid surfer, diver, and sailor —
the University of Rhode Island assistant professor is working on a project to
assess how effective Rhode Island’s shoreline access policies are, in a project
funded by the National Sea Grant Law Center.
An attorney who teaches in URI’s Department of Marine
Affairs, Professor Reiblich is writing and presenting on an important topic in
the Ocean State: How can access to its shorelines be protected if the boundary
is unclear?
Public access to the coast is threatened by a number of
factors, including climate change, development, and conflicting coastal uses.
Rhode Island’s Constitution guarantees certain coastal access privileges, but
these rights have been undermined by judicial decisions that define the “shore”
in limited ways.
In response to these discrepancies, Rhode Island’s
legislature two years ago passed a new shoreline access law that enshrines the
right of the public to access 10 feet above the mark of the last high tide.
Professor Reiblich says this new law functions as a coastal resilience law.
Now, he’s overseeing a research project aiming to evaluate the new law’s
effectiveness, hoping to share research findings with the government agencies
responsible for implementing the law.
Along with URI colleagues Melva Treviño Peña and Nathan
Vinhateiro, the trio will assess whether the shoreline’s newly defined
demarcation is sufficient for ensuring public coastal access and enhancing the
public’s ability to access the shore. They hope to determine whether Rhode
Island’s “shoreline” definition is legally sufficient or whether a new
delineation would be legally preferable, for users, property owners, and
regulators, as well as in the face of rising seas, eroding coastlines, and
other effects of climate change.
Professor Reiblich believes that Rhode Island stands out
within New England for protecting public ocean access: “Rhode Island’s effort
to protect shoreline access in this new law and in its Constitution is among
the strongest in the region,” he says.
The Arizona native who grew up in Florida first came to marine affairs through the surfing world, ultimately moving from law practice to academia. His legal background informs his current work and he is teaching Introduction to Marine and Ocean Law at URI this fall.
Prior to coming to URI in 2022, Professor Reiblich advised
on coastal law in Virginia and did judicial clerkships in the U.S. Virgin
Islands and on the Island of St. Croix. He was named a rising environmental
leader by Stanford University and is a volunteer member of the legal issues
team for the Surfrider Foundation.
Ocean access
Sea-level rise is perhaps the primary existential threat to
coastal access due to changing climates. Existing legal frameworks, which are
reactionary and rely on predictability, are typically ill-equipped to safeguard
public beach access from rising seas and progressive erosion.
Professor Reiblich recently co-authored a study with
colleagues from New Zealand and Brazil that appeared in last
month’s issue of Marine
Policy. The study examined public access to coastal environments and
resources and the challenges surrounding such access. The article also presents
examples that illustrate the difficulties in addressing them in real-world
contexts.
He says that public coastal access is being threatened by a
variety of stressors.
While access issues often make news, academic literature
explaining the contributing factors is scarce. There are also few analyses of
impacts or options to address long-term implications, which he hopes to address
in his work.
Coastal hazards complicate the management of public coastal
access, he says. The primary management concerns are likely to arise from
physical damage to land, property or infrastructure during periodic extreme
events associated with high winds, large swell, coastal flooding, and erosion.
Such natural extremes are predicted to become more intense with climate change,
but in many cases, it is the human responses to hazard events, rather than
their periodic occurrence, that can exert the biggest effect on outcomes.
Coastal development patterns pose a significant potential
threat to coastal access unless access issues are proactively identified and
incorporated in coastal zone management planning processes. New subdivisions
and ownership changes can adversely affect access to public space, and
increasingly crowded and developed coastlines have prompted some property
owners to use “ghost chairs” to deter the public from using beaches, or posting
misleading “no trespassing” signs to deter beachgoers.
These examples of access closures highlight the importance
of development approaches that integrate and prioritize coastal access points —
something he thinks about often as he regularly makes his way to the Rhode
Island coastline, with other residents of his new adopted home state.
