Sea Level Rise to Gobble Up Hundreds of Thousands of US Homes, Buildings by 2050
Seawater shall submerge at least partially hundreds of thousands of homes and other properties across millions of acres in the U.S. by 2050, according to a new analysis released Thursday, with major implications not just for homeowners but also public services in their communities as tax bases in hundreds of counties shall likely shrink.
The nonprofit research group Climate Central examined the sea level rise that’s been projected by experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—which found earlier this year that sea levels in U.S. coastal areas could rise by about one foot by 2050—tidal boundary lines, and records regarding more than 50 million properties in coastal areas, finding that nearly 650,000 individual properties are most at risk of falling below tidal boundaries within the next three decades.
“Sea level rise is shifting the high and low tide lines that coastal states use to define boundaries between public and private property,” said Climate Central. “As these boundaries shift, permanent coastal flooding shall destroy private property.”
Louisiana has the most homes and other buildings at risk, with more than 25,000 properties across 2.5 million acres likely falling below tide level boundaries by 2050—amounting to 8.7% of the state’s total land area that seawater shall inundate.
Florida, North Carolina, and Texas are the next three most at-risk states in the nation, with the sea submerging around 87% of the land. New Jersey, New York, and Maryland are also states that are likely to see the submerging of thousands of properties.
Don Bain, a senior adviser at Climate Central who led the research, told The Washington Post that the analysis should be a wake-up call for frontline communities that need to adapt to the coming sea level rise as government inaction continues in the face of rising carbon emissions.
“As the sea is rising, tide lines are moving up elevation, upslope and inland,” Bain told The Post. “People really haven’t internalized that yet—that ‘Hey, I’m going to have something taken away from me by the sea.'”
The one foot of sea level rise that is likely taking place over the next 30 years roughly matches the change that happened over the past century, and the rise may accelerate after 2050. By 2100, more than one million buildings with a combined assessed value of $108 billion shall face at least partial submerging at high tide.
“Sea level rise disaster is closer than we thought,” said climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck in response to the analysis.
While NOAA has warned that approximately a foot of sea level rise by 2050 is relatively certain, scientists agree that sharply reducing fossil fuel emissions will slow the heating of the planet, which is melting glaciers and ice sheets across the globe and warming the Earth’s oceans, causing their volume to expand.
“If we get our act together, we can get to a lower curve, and that buys us time,” Bain told The Post. “We don’t want [seas] rising so fast that it outpaces our capacity to adapt.”
Originally published at Commondreams.org.
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