Antarctic melt accelerates sea level rise
While renewable energy is on a roll—setting records in Europe over the last few months[1], and racking up impressive numbers in capacity buildout in 2017 [2], it’s easy to forget what is happening behind the scenes.
Extreme weather gets all the headlines: the wild fires in Canada and Sweden [3], the flooding in Japan, the heatwaves in Canada and the US. But what are called the slow onset climate change events are inexorably moving forward.
Think or swim
Let’s start with sea level. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) recently published a report called Underwater, which examined more closely the impact of future sea level rise on coastal cities in the US. The UCS took as their baseline that global mean sea levels would rise about 2 meters between 2010 and the end of the century—a projection judged as being very likely in several reports published last year.[4]
The UCS report looked at the impact on coastal communities of chronic inundation due to sea level rise—defined as a zone experiencing at least 26 floods a year. By the end of the century, the UCS analysis shows that as many as 2.4 million of today’s residential properties and about 107,000 commercial properties, worth roughly $1.07 trillion, would be at risk of chronic flooding.[5]
As several million American coastal residents are forced to move inland, coastal property values collapse. The tax base of coastal towns drops catastrophically—resulting in the dramatic reduction in numerous critical social services and the total impoverishment and eventual abandonment of many coastal communities.
In the US, Florida and New Jersey are most at risk. Over the next 30 years, roughly 64,000 homes in Florida and 62,000 in New Jersey will be at risk of chronic flooding.
These states are just the worst affected, but the whole of the eastern shoreline of the US and the coast of Atlantic Canada are all hugely at risk—particularly the low lying areas of Nova Scotia.
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