BY ZACH MORTICE
Aerial photo of damaged homes along the New Jersey shore after Hurricane Sandy. Photo credit: Greg Thompson/USFWS, Wikimedia Commons.
The Union of Concerned Scientists? recent report on the economic damage and displacement that sea-level rise flooding will unleash called for investments ?in a range of coastal adaptive measures,? such as ?the protection of wetlands, and barrier islands, and other natural flood risk reduction methods? and other ?natural infrastructure.? That puts the onus of surviving sea-level rise very clearly on landscape architects.
The report, Underwater: Rising Seas, Chronic Floods, and the Implications for US Coastal Real Estate, which the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) compiled with help from the real estate website Zillow, shows the consequences of sea-level rise in the short and long term, down to the state, city, and zip code levels of granularity. Released in June, it estimates lost houses, lost home value, lost tax base, and lost population by the years 2035 and 2100. The report defines chronic disruptive flooding as inundation that happens 26 times per year or more, and projects that in approximately the next 15 years, coastal flooding will wipe out $63 billion of housing wealth, affecting 280,000 people. In the next 30 years (the life of a standard mortgage), 300,000 houses could be lost. By the end of the 21st century, with a projected 6.6 feet of sea-level rise, 2.5 million residential and commercial properties will be c...