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Sea Level Rise Is Creeping into Coastal Cities. Saving Them Won’t Be Cheap.
发布日期:2024-12-23 20:59:47
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To get a sense of how much it will cost the nation to save itself from rising seas over the next 50 years, consider Norfolk, Virginia.

In November, the Army Corps released a proposal for protecting the city from coastal flooding that would cost $1.8 billion. Some experts consider the estimate low. And it doesn’t include the Navy’s largest base, which lies within city limits and likely needs at least another $1 billion in construction.

Then consider the costs to protect Boston, New York, Baltimore, Miami, Tampa, New Orleans, Houston and the more than 3,000 miles of coastline in between.

Rising seas driven by climate change are flooding the nation’s coasts now. The problem will get worse over the next 50 years, but the United States has barely begun to consider what’s needed and hasn’t grappled with the costs or who will pay. Many decisions are left to state and local governments, particularly now that the federal government under President Donald Trump has halted action to mitigate climate change and reversed nascent federal efforts to adapt to its effects.

“By and large, at every level of government, the nation is failing to recognize the challenge of sea level rise, much less address it in a proactive way,” said Robert Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Build Smarter, Move Away from the Risk

Moore said the country faces two main tasks: First, we have to stop building in risky, flood prone areas on the coast. Then we need to find ways to move people who already live there. One 2010 study estimated that 8.4 million Americans live in high-risk coastal flood areas.

Currently, federal policies including the National Flood Insurance Program are designed to encourage people to rebuild where they are, even if their properties are likely to flood again.

“What we do now is we basically wait for a disaster to happen and a massive disruption to occur and then we scramble around to get people back to where they were,” Moore said.
 

Moore and others are pushing for reforms that would encourage buy-outs of willing homeowners. (The House passed a bill in November that would adopt some of these reforms.)

Creating the Next New Orleans

Beyond that, most current adaptation plans rely on walling out the water, raising roads or other infrastructure and pumping out flood waters, a process Moore likens to creating “another New Orleans.” 

R.J. Lehmann, editor in chief of the conservative think tank R Street, said we’ll have to pick our battles by focusing on what’s worth protecting. “You look to a city like Atlantic City, which is on a barrier island and is highly vulnerable to floods” and which by some accounts is a failed city economically, he said. “Will we go to extraordinary lengths to save a city like Atlantic City? I think the answer is no.”

“We’re not in the habit of making those bloodless decisions on the cost and benefit of saving infrastructure,” he said. “We’re going to have to.”

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