Could Miami become the next Italy?

It seems as if almost everyone has a plan to save Miami, ranging from Dutch water experts to Danish architects, Harvard grad students, Swiss urbanists and New York engineers, as well as various hydrologists and biologists from here and there who’ve been weighing in on the subject of sea-level resiliency and climate change at recent conferences. Meanwhile, Miami continues to build higher buildings in flood-prone areas as if waiting for something, some deus ex machina, to come in and make it all right.

Florida is the flattest, lowest state in the country and has recently become the poster child for climate change. The region is under imminent threat, wedged as it is between the Atlantic on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other. “Miami, as we know it today, is doomed,” says Harold Wanless, head of geological sciences at the University of Miami, who has become the local Obi-Wan Kenobi, terrifying real estate speculators and politicians with his dire predictions. “It’s not a question of if,” he warns. “It’s a question of when.”

But how does one begin to prepare for such a future when Gov. Rick Scott, the state’s highest political official, remains an avowed climate denier and reportedly even prohibits state employees from using terms like “climate change” and “sea-level rise?” He proclaims “I am not a scientist” while ignoring the data that hundreds of real scientists have already gathered. By 2030 the sea may have risen more than two feet, say experts, and as much as six feet by the end of the century.

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