Picture a map of Florida, with its long sandy beaches and wetlands. Or cities like New York, Venice, and Alexandria, all metropolises with some pretty watery boundaries. Now, try to picture what these might look like in a hundred years. The Sunshine State might look very different than it does today.
The same goes for Manhattan Island, or Mumbai. This is our best guess of a warmer future, one where sea levels are gnawing away at the corners of our carefully drawn maps. Coastal cities are first in line for big changes, and some that can afford it are gearing up to spend billions to make sure they survive.
You might think of the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica as giant banks of freezers. And we're running down those rows of freezers, unplugging them. That's Ben Strauss, CEO and chief scientist of Climate Central. They're a non-profit organization that researches and reports on climate change, including sea level rise. Researchers like Ben have concluded that the world is guaranteed to see four feet of sea level rise just based on greenhouse gases we've already put into the atmosphere.
Once we unplug a freezer, it's unplugged. You can't plug it back in, and it's going to melt. That's pretty scary, especially if you live on a coast. And according to the UN, More than 600 million people live in coastal areas that are less than 30 feet above sea level. And any amount of further emissions will cause sea levels to rise higher, with scientists like Ben expecting a rise of 10 to 20 feet or more.
Some coastal areas are already struggling. During some high tides in Miami, water already slides across city streets. This is happening now, and it's a physical sign of rising sea levels.
There are already neighborhoods In the United States that I know about, where real estate value has evaporated because floods that used to be rare or non-existent now happen multiple times a year. It's a block here or a block there, but it's really affecting people. Climate Central created a visualizer called Surging Seas to drive this point home. It shows how coastal cities will fare as the climate heats up. Look at New York, New Orleans, Shanghai, or Lagos.
And you'll see how melting ice could push shorelines inland. It's one of a few projects online that are designed to make the threat feel immediate. I think climate change tends to be such an abstract and distant-seeming problem for most people. We want to make it as real and personal as possible.
People being able to look up their own neighborhood, their own home, helps to do that. Here in New York, the sea level is actually rising faster than in lots of other parts of the country. We did a whole video about it. Anyway, earlier this year, the city unveiled an ambitious plan to keep the lower part of Manhattan safe. I often said, after Sandy, you don't find a lot of climate change deniers in New York City.
They plan to fortify the city, and may actually build outland into the East River by 50 to 100 feet. It's not the first time that New York has reclaimed land from water, but prior expansions were mostly done to increase living space. This one will be to keep the water away from our living rooms. The plan will cost an estimated $10 billion. We can't overstate the disruption that it would cause to take no action, so we absolutely have to act.
Jamie Bavishi is the director of the Mayor's Office of Resiliency. Her team collaborated on a big study that looked into the climate risks faced by Lower Manhattan. So we didn't just look at sea level rise and storm surge, but we also looked at intense precipitation and extreme heat.
And across the city, you know, we're taking steps to address these multiple hazards and multiple risks that we face from climate change. For anyone living near the coast, sea level rise presents problems. But for cities, the issues are really unique. Imagine water pouring into the streets on a regular basis just during high tide.
You open your door and you walk into a street filled with water. It would impact underground infrastructure that we rely on. Imagine subway tunnels getting flooded on a regular basis, or the building, the foundations of buildings corroding.
In addition to building out into the river, the city plans to install floodgates at critical places that would flip up in a flood to keep water out of low-lying land. But for now, these plans are still just concepts. They aren't even sure how they'll pay for it yet.
But private funding is still on the table. We're not planning for development, but that also depends on whether or not we're able to get funding from the federal government. We'll have to figure out how to finance this.
If funding doesn't come from the federal government, then development might be part of the solution. Lower Manhattan, it's spooky to think about how dramatically climate change could redraw these city blocks. And it's obvious that one threatened area here is driving a lot of the urgency.
Wall Street. So Lower Manhattan is an economic center of the city. One in ten jobs are located in Lower Manhattan.
75% of subway lines go through Lower Manhattan. So we know that we need to protect Lower Manhattan in order to protect the economic vitality of New York City. But in a lot of places in the U.S. alone, extreme preventative measures like New York's are out of reach. Two communities, one in Alaska and another in Louisiana, are relocating to get away from rapidly eroding coasts.
And a 2018 study found that as many as 311,000 houses in the United States will be vulnerable to chronic flooding by 2045. In other words, climate migration is already a reality. And policymakers here in New York want to avoid the chaos that could come from displacing a city of almost 9 million people. You can't just pick up and move a city very easily. And because cities are such important concentrations of human lives and economic activity, I think we will invest a great deal in defending them.
I don't expect us to be trying to move Manhattan. I expect us to be defending it. as vigorously as we can.
We might not have as much time to build out the barricades as you might think. While most projections focus on 2100, it's not like sea levels will wait to 2099 to suddenly attack. Water will trickle in slowly, seeping into our lives and disrupting infrastructure, property values, and coastlines in the process.
It won't be sudden, but it will be fast. It's the speed of change that I think is the most dangerous thing about it. A bullet isn't dangerous if I'm holding it in my hand or throwing it at you.
It's the speed of the bullet that makes it dangerous. It's the speed of climate change and sea level rise which are going to make them dangerous. If you want to learn more about sea level rise, including why it doesn't rise at the same rate in all places, check out our other video.
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