Louisiana Plan Will Incentivize 1,000s Of Residents To Leave Sinking Coastal Parishes

[hatrack]

Louisiana is finalizing a plan to move thousands of people from areas threatened by the rising Gulf of Mexico, effectively declaring uninhabitable a coastal area larger than Delaware.

A draft of the plan, the most aggressive response to climate-linked flooding in the U.S., calls for prohibitions on building new homes in high-risk areas, buyouts of homeowners who live there now and hikes in taxes on those who won’t leave. Commercial development would still be allowed, but developers would need to put up bonds to pay for those buildings’ eventual demolition.

“Not everybody is going to live where they are now and continue their way of life,” said Mathew Sanders, the state official in charge of the program, which has the backing of Governor John Bel Edwards. “And that is an emotional, and terrible, reality to face.”

Months of community meetings on the program wrapped up this week. The draft plan, a portion of which was obtained by Bloomberg News, is part of a state initiative funded by the federal government to help Louisiana plan for the effects of coastal erosion. That erosion is happening faster in Louisiana than anywhere in the U.S., due to a mix of rising seas and sinking land caused in part by oil and gas extraction. State officials say they hope the program, called Louisiana Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments, or LA SAFE, becomes a model for coastal areas around the country and the world threatened by climate change.

EDIT

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-22/louisiana-sinking-fast-prepares-to-empty-out-its-coastal-plain

[member12]

1. When you build levees....

....the silt deposits from the rivers don't spread over the floodplain.

They should knock down the levees to combat global warming. They also should allow the Mississippi River to change course down the Atchafalaya basin.

[procon]

2. The gross greed of Big Oil caused this problem, but nothing is being done

to stop, or even slow the oil and gas extraction that caused the subsistence that forced coastal residents to be evacuated. Government isn't addressing any of the actual areas that caused the problem, they've just turned a blind eye to corporate greed that will continue to destroy the land and add to global warming, with no consequences whatsoever.