The Jersey Shore Would Rather Fight Flooding With Walls Than Retreat
By Christopher Flavelle for Bloomberg - In coastal New Jersey, the debate about whether the climate is changing has been superseded by a more urgent question: What to do about it? While local officials such as Spodofora want to build walls against rising seas and fiercer storms, environmentalists say that delays the inevitable. The best policy, they say, is to encourage people to move inland and let the most vulnerable areas disappear into the water. They may have found allies in the Federal Emergency Management Agency. After spending more than $278 billion on disaster relief over the past decade, the agency has begun to consider a change in tactics. In March, Bob Fenton, FEMA’s acting administrator, told a meeting of state emergency directors that governments need to find ways to reduce risk. “We need to move out of threatened areas,” he said. New Jersey shows just how hard that will be. Sea levels along the Jersey coast are projected to rise as much as a foot by 2030 and close to 2 feet by 2050, according to a 2016 report by Rutgers University. By 2100, if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, more than three-quarters of the property, by value, in some towns will be underwater.
