It's not the rate of coastal population growth, relative to that of the rest of the United States that is the newsmaker. Rather, it's the continued growth of people in limited coastal land areas.

All in all, the ratios of coastal and inland population growth actually have been "relatively stable" since 1970, with both coastal and inland counties growing about the same rates, according to a new report from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce. But those coastal counties constitute about 17 percent of total U.S. land area, not including Alaska, and house about 53 percent of the total U.S. population. Six of the counties with the highest increases in population from 1980 to 2003 are in California and three in Florida.

At the same time, the study says, "recent trends have also shown an increase in migration from coastal to noncoastal states. There too, California takes the top prize, accounting for at least one-third of Colorado's net migration between 1995 and 2000.

Some findings in the report, "Population Trends Along the Coastal United States: 1980-2008," from the National Ocean Service, part of NOAA. are:

• 23 of the 25 most densely populated counties in the United States are coastal. Those counties average 300 people per square mile as compared with 98 per square mile in noncoastal counties.
• Population density in coastal counties has increased by 65 persons per square mile (28 percent) since 1980 and is expected to increase to 78 persons per square mile, a further increase of 4 percent, by 2008.
• States leading in coastal population growth (persons per square mile) are Illinois (4,330); New Jersey (1,208); Rhode Island (1,030); Massachusetts (939); Pennsylvania (794); Connecticut (719).
• Of the 474 counties that did not meet the federal eight-hour ozone standard (or causing a downwind county to exceed it), 231 are coastal counties. Most of them are in the Northeast and the Great Lakes regions.
• Each day, coastal counties are losing 1,997 acres of farm land to urban and other land use, about two percent faster than noncoastal counties. The average size of farms in coastal counties has decreased by 15 percent between 1987 and 2002, about twice the rate of decrease (7 percent) in noncoastal counties.
• The Pacific region's 9.6 billion gallons of daily water consumption is more than twice that of any region other than the Gulf of Mexico region (six billion gallons a day).
• Coastal counties consume 20 billion gallons of water per day, four times less than the total water consumption in noncoastal counties.

"A change in paradigm is taking place," the NOAA report concludes in assessing the coastal population data. Society is "moving away from management based on political boundaries and toward an ecosystem-based management approach to population growth, urban sprawl, and their interactions with the sensitive coastal environment."

The NOAA report is available online at: http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/programs/mb/supp_cstl_population.html.