Researchers: It is advisable to make an orderly withdrawal from the coastal areas because of the warming

The climate crisis is pushing more and more people to leave their homes. The evacuation is carried out in different ways, and in many cases is seen as a last resort and a failure to adapt to changes. A team of researchers claims that withdrawal from certain areas may actually be the best solution, if planned in advance

Dr. Yonat Ashhar, Davidson Institute

In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast of the United States, flooding homes and streets and causing damage estimated at tens of billions of dollars. The hardest hit was New York City and coastal cities in neighboring New Jersey. Almost seven years have passed since then, and in most places, almost everything is back to normal. But not in the Oakwood Beach neighborhood of Staten Island.

It wasn't just the damage suffered by many houses in the neighborhood due to extensive flooding, and not even the damage to the infrastructure, that caused the big change - but the realization that this flood would not be the last. In the changing climate, with rising sea levels, floods and hurricanes are devastating and coming more and more frequently. "By 2050, if sea levels rise as quickly as many scientists predict, what is now considered a 'once-in-a-century flood' will occur five times more frequently. Wide-scale destruction will be a once-in-a-generation event," wrote Andrew Rice on the New York Times website. York.

In light of all this, the state of New York made a strategic decision: to give up the neighborhood in order to protect other areas of the city. Residents were given the option to sell their homes to the state, and most of them did so. Crews were sent to the abandoned houses to blow them up, clear the rubble, and plant swamp plants instead. These have already sprouted, and today bushes and grasses fill the formerly inhabited areas. Wild geese nest in parking lots, turkeys and deer roam the streets. Nature has reclaimed Oakwood Beach.

Coastal islands and cities are in danger

The neighborhood in Staten Island is not the only place that humans have left due to climate change - not even the only one in the United States. In 2016, for example, the residents of the village of Shishmaref in Alaska decided to leave the island where they lived, after the shrinking glaciers left it exposed to strong storms and coastal erosion: Loss of land due to wave and wind activity. Isle de Jean Charles off the coast of Louisiana has lost 98 percent of its area to coastal erosion, flooding and subsidence. A Native American tribe that lived there received funding from the United States government to move to the continent.

In island countries the problem is even more difficult: some of them do not have high or stable enough areas to move to. The small island nation of Kiribati in the Pacific Ocean is facing the real possibility of a future in which a hundred thousand of its inhabitants will no longer be able to live on its shrinking territory, and in 2014 the government bought territory in Fiji to which they could move.

In the near future, more and more people will be forced to abandon the place where they live and move - not only due to the loss of land on islands and the flooding of coastal areas, but also due to other forms and phenomena that will make quite a few areas around the world very difficult to settle. Is the world properly prepared for this?

Not if, but how

In an article published this evening (Thursday) in the journal Science, researchers from the United States call for a "strategic and managed climate retreat". The question is no longer if there will be a retreat due to the climate crisis, the researchers write, but "how, where and why" such retreats will occur. Today, too often, evacuation of residents is done without a comprehensive long-term plan. In New York, for example, while Oakwood Beach and nearby neighborhoods are being evacuated, more houses are being built in other coastal areas such as Williamsburg and Long Island, which may also have to be evacuated later.

Withdrawal from an area that has become unfit for settlement can be done in several ways: buying the houses by the government as was done on Staten Island, moving the entire community as was done on Jean Charles Island, banning construction or settlement in a certain area and more. A well-managed retreat should take into account the needs of the residents, and the resources of the state, everywhere. Some communities will certainly want to keep their unique fabric and move as a single unit, but this is a very expensive solution that will not always be possible. Passing regulations that would prohibit living somewhere is much cheaper, but if the people living there do not have the means to move, such regulations will not be very useful.

The researchers call for the evacuation plans to be included in the economic plans of countries and international organizations, to be managed not at the local level but at the political or regional level, and above all, to change the way we think about such a withdrawal. Today, withdrawal seems like a last resort, not really a solution but rather an inevitable and undesirable consequence of the failure of the previous solutions that were tried, such as building higher dams or strengthening the houses and infrastructure. But according to the researchers, evacuating residents can in many cases be the best solution, both for the residents and for the country as a whole. If such evacuations are planned in advance, as part of a broad development and investment plan, they can be carried out in a more efficient and convenient way for all involved.

According to some estimates, the climate crisis may make tens of millions of people homeless. In order to deal with a crisis of this magnitude, not only research is needed that can predict which areas will be hit the hardest, but also economic plans that take this into account, and make it possible to properly prepare for it.

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More of the topic in Hayadan:

• Who moved my beach?
• The sea will flood the coastal cities - in Tel Aviv the water may reach as far as Ibn Gvirol St
• Researchers from the Hebrew University reveal the expected damage to the settlements along the coast following the rise in sea level
• The coastline is moving eastward due to a rise in the level of the Mediterranean Sea