by Catarina Conran

June 25, 2025

In the Chesapeake Bay, shorelines have always shifted. Wind, tides, and storms steadily reshape the contours of islands and marshes. This kind of change is part of the Bay’s natural cycle, a push and pull between water and land that has defined its ecosystems for centuries. But over the last century, the pace of change has accelerated. Entire islands that once supported vibrant communities, like Holland Island and Sharps Island, have slipped beneath the waves. Others, like Smith and Tangier, are shrinking fast, losing acres of ground each year. Without intervention, USGS warns that many more of the Bay’s islands and marshlands could disappear within just a few decades.

Island loss in the Bay is driven by “relative sea-level rise.” In other words, global sea-level rise is compounded by land subsidence in the Bay (the gradual sinking of the land itself), resulting in some of the fastest rising water levels on the East Coast. This land subsidence is the result of both natural geological processes and groundwater pumping, particularly for municipal and agricultural use, which accelerates subsidence by compacting underground aquifers (like a sponge being squeezed). This “double squeeze” means marshes and islands that once adapted to slow change can no longer keep pace.

The ecological stakes are high. Disappearing islands mean disappearing wetland habitats, which serve as nurseries for blue crabs and striped bass, stopover points for migratory birds, and buffers against storm surges. Wetlands also act as carbon sinks, as vegetation pulls CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it in waterlogged and oxygen-poor soils, thereby preventing decomposition and locking carbon away for centuries. As these ecosystems vanish, we lose both biodiversity and natural climate resilience.

The cultural stakes are high as well. Beyond being an ecological treasure, the Chesapeake is also home to centuries-old watermen communities. On Tangier Island, for example, residents trace their roots back to the 1600s. As the shoreline recedes, homes, churches, and cemeteries face relocation or loss. These cultural landscapes are as irreplaceable as the ecosystems around them, making this not just a conservation challenge, but an environmental justice issue as well, since vulnerable communities often have the fewest resources with which to adapt.

The Legal Regime

Current legal frameworks offer partial protection, but they were not designed for the scale of loss we are now seeing. The Clean Water Act can regulate dredging and filling, but cannot prevent rising seas from swallowing wetlands. The Coastal Zone Management Act encourages states to plan for resilience, but implementation is uneven and often underfunded. Local governments, meanwhile, continue to permit the installation of seawalls or bulkheads that help to protect individual properties but accelerate erosion elsewhere. Other major federal statutes like the Endangered Species Act or the Migratory Bird Treaty Act protect species that depend on these habitats, but not the habitats themselves when climate change is the main driver of loss. And, while the National Flood Insurance Program recognizes flood risks, it can unintentionally encourage rebuilding in flood-prone areas by providing subsidized insurance, even in places that are ecologically unsustainable.

For the Bay’s islands and wetland habitats to endure, conservation law must catch up to ecological reality. That means:

• Strengthening wetland protections to prioritize restoration projects (e.g., living shorelines, oyster reef rebuilding, marsh migration corridors) over short-term solutions
• Embedding climate science in permitting processes (which rarely require agencies to explicitly assess long-term climate risks) would make project approvals more resilient to future sea-level rise
• Securing upland parcels via conservation easements to ensure wetland habitats are preserved as shorelines move inland
• Investing in relocation support and cultural preservation for residents of threatened Bay islands (ensuring that residents are partners in any strategies)

Resilience and Moving Forward

The Chesapeake Bay has always been dynamic, but today the speed of change threatens to erase both natural and cultural treasures. Having grown up in Virginia with the Bay’s marshes and shorelines a constant reminder of the beauty of our planet, these natural environments feel truly irreplaceable. But conservation in this moment is about more than saving individual species or parcels of land. Instead, it is about defending the resilience of an entire ecosystem and the communities that depend on it. The Bay’s vanishing islands remind me that conservation is not just about resisting change but about meeting it wisely, ensuring that these unique ecosystems, habitats, and communities still have the chance to endure.