Slowly, Grudgingly, Some American Cities Beginning To Retreat From The Rising Ocean

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Retreating from the coasts, in concept or practice, is not popular. Why would people abandon their community, the thinking goes, unless no better alternatives remained? To emergency responders, retreat is a form of flood mitigation. To environmental advocates, it’s ecological restoration. To resilience planners, it’s adaptation to climate change. Everyone agrees, however, that retreat sounds like defeat. It means admitting that humans have lost and that the water has won. “American political institutions, even our national mythology, are ill-suited to the indeterminacy and elasticity of nature,” wrote journalist Cornelia Dean nearly two decades ago in her book Against the Tide. “It would almost be un-American to concede ... that it is we who must adapt to the ocean, not the other way around.”

The U.S. has occasionally experimented with retreat on a tiny scale by offering voluntary buyouts to waterlogged families. The outcome is rarely promising. “Buyouts are extremely expensive, extremely disruptive, and many of the attempts have not gone well,” says Craig Fugate, former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). They invoke fear among citizens in every political stratum, bringing to mind land grabs, racist resettlement projects, class warfare, and, depending on your ideology, either federal overreach or federal abandonment. Because they require coordination among politicians, homeowners, lawyers, engineers, banks, insurers and all levels of government, they are enormously complicated to execute, even poorly. At their worst, buyouts break up community support systems, entrench inequality and leave a checkerboard of blighted lots in their wake. At their best, they avoid these things and still displace people from their homes.

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Superstorm Sandy changed that. The hurricane made sea-level rise, an abstract, future problem for far-flung places, manifest in the form of drowned subway lines and a roller coaster tossed into the waves. It communicated both the experience and evidence of future flooding in a way that probabilities never could. “It’s Global Warming, Stupid,” said the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek. Political leaders in New York State and New Jersey, sensing a tonal shift, realized they couldn’t just talk about rebuilding without also talking about resiliency, the rising buzzword of disaster preparedness.

Environmental types were also acknowledging that they could no longer fixate solely on the problem of carbon emissions. Rob Moore was executive director of the Environmental Advocates of New York back in 2012. “We didn’t want to talk about adaptation, because we saw it as a distraction from mitigating climate change,” he says. “But Sandy made it unavoidable.” A few months later Moore took a job at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to work on how the country would cope with rising seas. Climate scientists who study the acceleration of sea-level rise felt a similar urgency, and many emerged from their silos to produce better projections. “Now the geophysical people are talking to the atmospheric people and to the economists and the sociologists,” says Robert E. Kopp, director of the Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Rutgers University and a lead author on major climate reports. This interdisciplinary approach has led to localized forecasting. Instead of only one number—the global mean—we now know that sea-level rise will vary significantly from region to region.

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/surrendering-to-rising-seas/