All At Sea

Rising seas will overwhelm many of our coastal regions unless we move fast. Whether to protect or retreat from low-lying areas – either option carries considerable economic, social and environmental costs and it’s a debate communities cannot tackle in isolation.

- Sally Blundell

We are good at sensing danger. Some dangers anyway. Faced with a guy with a knife or an animal with big teeth, says climate change commentator Jeff Goodell, we humans have evolved to defend ourselves, “but we are not wired to prepare for the barely perceptible threats that gradually accelerate over time”.

Such as sea-level rise, writes Goodell, in his prosaically titled The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World. With the rising tide already gnawing at coastal regions around the globe, by the end of this century, hundreds of millions of people will be forced to retreat inland, “but that is the part no one wants to talk about.”

Goodell, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, is the author of several critically acclaimed books on climate change and energy issues and was in New Zealand earlier this year. He gives the example of the small settlement of Broad Channel in New York. Families have lived there since the 1920s. They swim, they fish, they have a great view of lower Manhattan. Come hell or high water, the residents are not going to leave their homes. But high water it will be. Low-lying Broad Channel was one of the most heavily damaged areas of the city when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012 and is swamped regularly by tidal flooding and storm surges that will only get worse.

“But they love where they live and the whole notion of getting up and going somewhere else is very hard,” says Goodell from his home in upstate New York. “Even people who understand climate change still think sea-level rise is a slow, gradual thing and they can build a seawall that will be fine for X number of years and this is a remedy for the problem.” It’s not.