Flooding in Port Sulphur, Louisiana.
Credit: Mario Tama
As sea levels rise, U.S. communities have several strategies to cope with the effects of climate change, the president of the National Academy of Sciences said yesterday.
There’s triage for high-dollar assets, like airports and military installations and even the Statue of Liberty, Marcia McNutt said. But more and more, she added, “organized retreat” is a part of the conversation.
That strategy, once politically unpalatable, has emerged from the shadows in recent months as scientists, community leaders and governments try to figure out how to move people out of the way of coastal flooding and other hazards.
Such a strategy could start with building codes, McNutt told an audience gathered yesterday at the National Press Club for an event organized by the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. The event, which focused on adaptation to climate change, is part of a series highlighting the environmental and energy challenges and risks that the Trump administration must confront in the coming years, including adaptation to climate change.
Communities could require that people in […]
Research shows humans are notorious for failing to recognize long term threats due to blind spot left from being hard wired to respond to short term threats. Building large population centers and housing directly on coastal areas & floodplains is blatantly foolhardy at best. The 2004 tsunami , 2005 Hurricane Katrina and 2011 Fukashima disasters should have been wakeup alarms to humanity that in man vs nature…nature will ultimately reclaim its territory. It appears we kept hitting the snooze button.