SOUTH CAROLINA

South Carolina is home to just over 5 million people. 40th in size among the states, it covers just over 30 thousand square miles of land and boasts a 187-mile ocean shoreline consisting of the Grand Strand, an unbroken beach stretching from the North Carolina border southward for more than 100 miles before giving way to the tidal and freshwater marshes of the Sea Islands, which extend into Georgia. Before colonization, South Carolina was home to Native American tribes such as the Catawba, Chicora, PeeDee, Creek and Cusobo. English colonizers established a large settlement that would become North and South Carolina in 1670, and began bringing captured peoples from Africa to labor on plantations. Boone Hall, the oldest plantation in the country, can be found in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.

CLIMATE IMPACTS

Sea level rise, fueled by warming waters, poses an urgent threat to South Carolina’s coastal ecosystems, economy (which is primarily agricultural and tourism), as well as the lives of almost 230 thousand people who live in risk of coastal flooding — a number expected to increase by over 50 thousand within thirty years. 

• Cities like Charleston are already seeing frequent floods during high tide.
• As severe storms and hurricanes grow more frequent and more intense, with 32federally declared disasters between 1954-2025for water related incidents alone, the general sea level rise compounds the threat of a storm surge. 
• By 2050, a 100-year flood will become nine times more likely, or an approximately 1-in-11-year event. 
• A changing climate is also likely to change the composition of South Carolina’s forests, which cover two-thirds of the state.

ENERGY

• South Carolina has no petroleum, coal or gas reserves or production. All their fossil fuels come from outside the state, primarily by rail or by pipeline.
• Nuclear energy is the leading source of electricity generation in South Carolina, producing 55% of total electricity in 2023. The state ranks third in the nation for both generating capacity and annual generation.
• Natural gas accounted for23% of the state’s electricity generation in 2023,more than doubling since 2013, and exceeding coal for the first time in 2018. 
• Coal still accounts for 15% of total generation. •South Carolina’s primary renewables supply the rest (about 7%), including hydropower facilities, biomass-fueled power plants that use wood waste or landfill gas, and solar energy. 
• Solar power is fast growing in South Carolina, accounting for 3% of total electricity in 2023, four times greater than in 2018. An additional 1600 megawatts are scheduled to come online in the state by 2026. 
• South Carolina even has an anaerobic digester, which came online in 2011, generating power from methane gas captured at a hog farm and from another that uses poultry waste in 2013. 
• Generating more electricity than it consumes, South Carolina pumps its surplus across the regional grid to other states. 

LEGISLATION

• South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford issued an Executive Order in 2007 establishing the Governor’s Climate, Energy, and Commerce Advisory Committee. 
• The Committee released South Carolina’s first and only statewide climate plan in 2008. Titled The South Carolina Climate, Energy and Commerce Action Plan, the report focuses on specific actions for reducing GHG emissions. 
• South Carolina passed a Voluntary Renewables Portfolio Standard bill in 2014, calling for 2% renewable energy utility-scale generating capacity by 2021. This goal was met in 2021, but the state has not yet updated that standard to reflect either the urgency of the climate crisis or the growth of renewables’ role in its energy mix. 
• The 2018 update to the South Carolina Hazard Mitigation Plan, without once mentioning climate change, analyzes risks affecting the state and identifies actions to mitigate their impact. 
• The 2020 South Carolina Disaster Relief and Resilience Act mandated the release of a comprehensive resilience plan, and developed two funds: the Disaster Relief and Resilience Reserve Fund, and the South Carolina Resilience Revolving Fund. 
• The South Carolina Office of Resilience released the Strategic Statewide Resilience and Risk Reduction Plan in 2023, which, like the Hazard Mitigation Plan, manages to avoid any mention of climate change while evaluating risks from “extreme weather events.” 
• The city of Charleston released its own Climate Action Plan in May 2021. The plan focuses on reducing carbon pollution with 51 action items across different areas including buildings, transportation, waste and carbon sinks. 
• In 2024 South Carolina released its Priority Climate Action Plan(PCAP) under the EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants Program. This represents the state’s first climate plan since 2008.