The water will come

Last month (February 2018), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a technical report in which it was found that over the last several decades, annual frequencies of high tide flooding are linearly increasing in 31 locations in the US, mostly along the coasts of the Northeast/Southeast Atlantic and the Eastern/Western Gulf of Mexico, and to a lesser extent, along the Northwest and Southwest Pacific coast. By 2100, under the Intermediate Low Scenario, high tide flooding will occur ‘every other day’ or more often under and within the Northeast and Southeast Atlantic, the Eastern and Western Gulf, and the Pacific Islands. In the words of Margaret Davidson, founding director of NOAA’s Coastal Services Center (CSC), “Today’s flood will become tomorrow’s high tide.”

Eventually, if fossil fuel burning continues at current rates, the number of Americans living in homes that flood daily would jump to 13 million. More than 6 million of them would be living in Florida.

Jeff Goodell, a journalist and contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, has been reporting on climate change for years. Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York in October 2012, was a transformative event for him. The storm surge occurred near the time of high tide along the Atlantic Coast. This contributed to record tide levels, at 8.99 feet on top of tides almost twice that of its nearest rivals. Jeff Goodell started thinking about this. What if the water didn’t go away? What would be the impact of rising sea levels on coastal cities? He also wants to makes us think deeply about this issue. Can we overcome the willful blindness on sea-level rise and on climate change in general? CO2 levels are higher than they’ve ever been in the history of human life and as long as human beings have been in this planet. Big changes are going to happen in the world no matter what we do, whether we will “sell our SUVs and ride skateboards to work tomorrow,” we’re already facing a rapidly changing planet, he writes.

In his book, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilised World, Jeff Goodell visits Miami, Venice, New York, Rotterdam, Nigeria, Alaska, and Greenland to explore the risks these cities and regions are facing from rising seas. Especially for Miami and the surrounding areas, rising sea levels would be a potentially disastrous problem. Miami does not need storms to cause flooding (as in the case of Sandy in New York), as flooding from high sea levels can occur on sunny days due to high tides and the city’s low topography. But it is not just Miami. It works good as an illustration, but all coastal cities, including, New York, London, Calcutta, Mumbai, Tokyo will be in danger from rising seas.

It remains difficult to predict how the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets will respond to continued increased temperatures. West Antarctica, for example, continue to lose mass, but other parts of the Antarctica receive more snowfall from the increased moisture in the warmer air.

But, the water will come. The biggest question is, how high will it go and how fast it will happen. It will be an incremental process. The rising sea levels will not stop in 2100; they will continue rising in the following centuries as the sea continues to take up heat and glaciers continue to retreat. And the water, it is not going to be a pretty, clean water that you would like to go swimming. It will be a dirty water, full of chemicals and sewage, the kind of water that raises a lot of questions about diseases, and even drinking water because sea-level rise could cause saltwater intrusion in coastal aquifers.

Building walls to defend cities from rising water could be one solution. It is expensive but it is doable. New York, along with other adaptive measures like dunes and flood gates, is considering it. Venice is already building a wall. The city sank by 23 centimetres during the 20th century and its governors describe the problem as critical. The high water damage the city and cause disruption to the inhabitants. When the high tide season arrives, the streets of Venice become blocked and the residents have to walk on wooden planks in order to stay above the water. Hence, the multibillion-dollar effort to install flood-protection walls that can be raised to block incoming tides. The MOSE project (Mose is the Italian word for Moses, and an acronym for Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico), was designed 25 years ago, and it has been under construction for ten years but has been dogged by delays and corruption. In 2014, 35 people were arrested, among them the then major of the city.

“The simple truth is,” writes Jeff Goodell, “human beings have become a geological force on the planet, with the power to reshape the boundaries of the world in ways we didn’t intend and we don’t entirely understand”. As the waters rise, millions of these people will be displaced. We need, therefore, a vision for the future. A vision of how to live with water. Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi, founder of the firm NLÉ, envisions a future in which coastal dwellings are built on platforms stacked with flotation devices. The impact of climate change is now day-to-day reality. Only by addressing the challenges of climate change we’ll be able to mitigate urban flood risks and disasters.