Tag: Current sea level rise

Posted on in Climate change, Hurricane Sandy

From the United States : Storm’s Lessons for Florida

BBC London News

Long-Term Sea Level Rise Could Cost Washington...
Long-Term Sea Level Rise Could Cost Washington, D.C. Billions (Photo credit: University of Maryland Press Releases)

From International Herald Tribune reports on the devastation from last week’s superstorm #sandy that is resonating in Florida, which escaped the brunt but faces parallel risks from the combined effects of sea-level rise and intense storms. InsideClimate News – see below

A different kind of water world: flooding in the Coney Island aquarium. – to be covered in a future blog

The government of Laos says it has given the go-ahead for construction of a massive dam on the lower Mekong River that is vigorously opposed by neighboring countries and environmentalists. BBC – covered in next blog 

There appears to be little hope of eradicating a fungal disease that is decimating England and Scotland’s ash trees. BBC News – covered in the next blog

FULL ARTICLE..

Superstorm Sandy Delivers Wake-Up Call for Low-Lying Florida

Dozens of cities in Florida would be flooded with a 3- to 7-foot rise in sea level—substantially lower than Hurricane Sandy’s 9-foot storm surge in NYC.

Nov 5, 2012
Map of Tampa, Fla. if sea levels rose by 5 feet.Map of Tampa, Fla. under a 5-foot sea level rise (flooded areas in blue). © 2007 2030, Inc. and © 2007 Google. Image courtesy of Architecture 2030, http://www.architecture2030.org

For much of the Northeast, Hurricane Sandy was a harsh wake-up call to the extreme weather destruction that can be amplified by climate change. But Sandy’s warning is also resonating in states further south along the Atlantic, which escaped the brunt of the storm but face equal, if not greater, risks from the combined effects of sea level rise and intense storms.

Florida is particularly vulnerable. A 2007 climate change study that mapped how a 9.8-foot sea level rise would affect New York City—maps eerily similar to the flooding from Sandy’s 9-foot storm surge—also offered a look at how Florida would be affected. If anything, the images are even more chilling.

The scenarios for Florida are based on a sea level rise of roughly 3 to 7 feet. The coastal fringe of downtown Miami, where many of the city’s luxury hotels are located, is covered in blue—the map’s symbol for inundated land. Nearly all of Key West would be underwater, except for a few pockets of high ground including the area near Key West Cemetery. Fort Lauderdale would be flooded along most of its coast, as would downtown Tampa.

The study was published by Architecture 2030, a nonprofit that seeks to reduce the carbon footprint of the building sector. Founder Edward Mazria said the key difference between storm surge and sea level rise is that the former is temporary while the latter is permanent.

After a severe storm, cities like New York can rebuild, Mazria said, because the surge of water will drain off and leave the land dry again. But sea level rise is permanent and will force people to “either abandon the area or, if it’s extremely valuable territory, then you [can] expend up to tens of billions of dollars” to protect it with sea walls and other measures.

Some communities could also adapt by constructing buildings on stilts, he said, or by lifting smaller structures off their foundations and moving them to higher ground.

According to recent projections by the U.S. Geological Survey, the world’s ocean levels will rise about 2 to 6 feet by 2100. That would be devastating for Florida, where the average elevation of the entire state is only a few feet above sea level. In July, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)ranked Miami as the city in the world with the most to lose from sea level rise.

Although climate change has become divisive in the national political debate, it’s much less controversial in southern Florida, where it already affects everyday life, said climate expert Leonard Berry.

Berry is a professor at Florida Atlantic University in Jupiter, about 60 miles north of Fort Lauderdale. On October 11, two weeks before Hurricane Sandy made landfall, he was among the 121 Florida scientists and public officials who signed a letter urging President Obama and Mitt Romney to discuss climate change at the Boca Raton debate.

“Florida is already feeling the effects of sea level rise and, increasingly, it jeopardizes the health, safety, and economic well-being of our communities,” they wrote.

According to a recent analysis of the U.S. coastal population by Climate Central, a nonprofit dedicated to climate change research and reporting, nearly 5 million people live less than four feet above sea level. About half of them are in Florida.

Berry said southeast Florida is particularly vulnerable due to its low elevation, susceptibility to powerful storms and a porous geology that allows saltwater to seep in underground.

 

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Posted on in Climate change

Climate Update : More than 30 million climate migrants in Asia in 2010, report finds

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Image via Wikipedia

More than 30 million people were displaced last year by environmental and weather-related disasters across Asia, experts have warned, and the problem is only likely to grow worse as climate change exacerbates such problems.

Tens of millions more people are likely to be similarly displaced in the future by the effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, floods, droughts and reduced agricultural productivity. Such people are likely to migrate in regions across Asia, and governments must start to prepare for the problems this will create, the Asian Development Bank warned.

The costs will be high – about $40bn is the likely price for adapting and putting in place protective measures, from sea walls to re-growing mangrove swamps that have been cut down, and that can help to protect against the impacts of storm surges.

But the problem is already taking effect, though at a much lower scale than is likely in the future. “While large-scale climate-induced migration is a gradual phenomenon, communities in Asia and the Pacific are already experiencing the consequences of changing environmental conditions including eroding shorelines, desertification and more frequent severe storms and flooding,” the bank said at a workshop last week. This could lead to a widespread crisis across the region in coming years, if preparations are not made to deal with the current and probable future consequences.

Robert Dobias, climate change project chief at the Asian Development Bank, said that at present climate change is still a relatively small cause of migration, as economic causes loom largest and as environmental disasters happen independently of global warming. However, the problem is likely to increase in future years, with potentially severe consequences, including conflict as people are forced to move long distances.

Areas most at risk are low-lying islands such as the Maldives, whose environment minister, Mohamed Aslam, said the populations of entire islands in the archipelago had been forced to move. But coastal cities in developed regions could also face the threat of higher seas and storm surges, while regions that already suffer severe floods such asBangladesh will have their risks intensified.

The Asian Development Bank warned that governments must start to make preparations now, to be ready for the multiplying threats, and because more extreme weather has already started to take effect, though changes so far have not been dramatic in their impact. “The number of extreme weather events is increasing and Asia and the Pacific is the region at the epicentre of weather disasters,” the group said.

The bank is working on a report that will set out in detail the likely problems and propose a range of potential policy changes to help to deal with them. The report will be published next spring, though preliminary research is being disclosed at a series of regional conferences in the intervening months.

The probable solutions are likely to include measures to improve vital infrastructure, such as energy provision, transport systems and communication networks, in order to make such infrastructure more resilient to the effects of climate change.

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