‘It’s happening now’: how rising sea levels are causing a US migration crisis (The Guardian)

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

‘It’s happening now’: how rising sea levels are causing a US migration crisis | Environment | The Guardian

WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM

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The coming mass migration of flood-prone areas will have huge social and economic costs – but the government doesn’t have an adequate plan

 

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Sea levels have risen about 9in since 1880, with one-third of that gain from the last 25 years alone. Every year, a flurry of reports are published warning of the risk to towns and cities along coastal areas.

 

It’s one thing to hear about a looming disaster; it’s another to see the cataclysm play out in real time. That’s what’s happening in Taholah, a village on Washington’s coast that acts as the capital for the Quinault Indian Nation, a tribe of about 3,600 members. In Taholah, climate change-caused sea level rise has brought to the community a fast receding shoreline, and with it a heightened threat of flooding: according to Quinault estimates, the ocean level could increase by 2.6ft by 2100, pushing storm surges higher and bringing waves closer to town.

 

On an overcast February morning, Larry Ralston, the 62-year-old treasurer of the Quinault Nation, drove his silver Ford SUV down a network of Taholah’s unmarked gravel roads, telling me about what this place used to look like, before climate change permanently reconfigured the landscape.

Parked on a rock face overlooking the Pacific, he nodded toward a moss-covered boulder towering out of the water. As a kid in the 60s, Ralston said, he was able to trek by foot to the rock. And now? He reckons the water is 30ft deep. Back then the ocean didn’t seem like a menace – at least not an existential one. That’s no longer the case: some 660 Taholah residents who border the ocean now find themselves living in an increasingly dangerous flood zone. The only solution is for everyone – and everything – in the village to move uphill.

 

“We can see firsthand what’s happening,” Ralston told me. “There’s no denying it.”

 

Taholah signals what’s to come for coastal communities across the country.

 

Already, about 15 million American homes are at risk of flooding, and the threat is only going to get worse. A report released in February by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) projected that sea level along the US coastline would rise by 10 to 12in, on average, in the next 30 years – an uptick that would make damaging flooding occur 10 times more often than it does today.

 

“It’s important to understand in these communities that sea level rise is happening now,” said William Sweet, an oceanographer with Noaa’s National Ocean Service and the country’s top scientist studying sea level rise. “Its impacts are happening now, and those impacts will grow worse in the next 30 years. Minor-nuisance flooding will be replaced by flooding that’s more damaging to economies and to infrastructure.”

 

That future could very well touch off a mass migration of people away from coastline and flood zones. Research published in 2020 in the journal PLOS One estimated that sea level rise could cause over 13 million Americans to relocate inland by 2100 – an outcome with huge economic, social and political consequences.

 

 

[marioandsonic]

Well,humanity had a good run.

[Zaku3]

Assuming the US is still intact when this really kicks off expect COVID to be our template. Massive help to corporations and scraps for everyone else. With an extra helping of thoughts and prayers.

[Zaku3]

1 minute ago, marioandsonic said:

Well,humanity had a good run.

 

Our run is varing levels of grim dark.