'Managed Retreat' From Rising Seas & Rivers, Controversial For Some But New Global Reality
Retreat From Rising Seas? It May Be Controversial, but It’s the World’s New Reality. “These changes will happen whether we like it or not.” Mother Jones, Sept. 2, 2019. EXCERPTS:
...Retreating from coastlines and riversides might have once been considered unthinkable. But across the world, it’s already happening—in Australia, Colombia, Vietnam, and here in the United States. Thousands of homeowners in Houston have asked the local county to buy their chronically flooded properties. A New Jersey town is moving residents out of risky areas near the rivers and turning the land into a natural buffer to protect other homes. The US military is at work constructing a new site for an indigenous Yup’ik community in Alaska that asked to be relocated after thawing permafrost beneath the village caused it to slide into the river.
An overheating planet and unchecked development along the coasts have let the sea expand into new territory, leaving many people who live along the shores unsettled (in both senses of the word). According to the United Nations, up to 1 billion people could be displaced by storms, droughts, and floods in 30 years. In the United States, the cost for protecting people and property from rising seas and intense downpours is expected to climb into the hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming decades—and that’s a conservative estimate.
-- A home is seen inundated with water from Hurricane Florence as it passed through North Carolina during Sept. 2018.
There’s “an ongoing mass migration” away from our coasts, said Elizabeth Rush, author of the Pulitzer-prize nominated book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore. “These changes will happen whether we like it or not,” Rush said. “How profoundly and how detrimentally they reshape our coastal communities is up to us.”...“Managed retreat” is a controversial response to climate change. It’s the idea that communities and governments should be strategic about moving people away from areas that have become too waterlogged to live in safely. The phrase used to be, and maybe still is, taboo—Rush called it “a four-letter word”—but it’s beginning to make its way into the public conversation as one of the tools we can use to adapt to sea-level rise.
Presidential candidate and former tech executive Andrew Yang released a plan on Monday preparing for the “inevitability” of sea-level rise, promising coastal communities $40 billion to help people “move to higher ground” or elevate their homes, plus another $30 billion in seawalls, sewer upgrades, natural barriers, and other forms of protection from the rising seas. The idea is also getting attention from academics, with a first-of-its-kind conference about coastal relocation earlier this summer... But there are many obstacles. Among the biggest: Managed retreat has a reputation problem. In California, where more than 30 cities and counties are mired in difficult discussions about how to protect their coastlines, few things have managed to get people more riled up than the idea of abandoning America’s prime real estate...
Read More, https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/09/retreat-from-rising-seas-it-may-be-controversial-but-its-the-worlds-new-reality/
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