Researchers issue urgent warning over increasingly powerful threat to coastal communities: 'When it happens, it's going to be worse'
Coastal communities are experiencing excessive flooding — a form of extreme weather — at alarming new rates, and scientists are sounding the alarm about wildly insufficient infrastructure in low-lying urban areas.
Researchers from UC Santa Cruz and the United States Geological Survey teamed up to identify novel flood mitigation strategies, citing an urgent need to shore up coastlines, and their joint findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports.
"By 2050, the coastal flooding from extreme storms we currently consider once-in-a-lifetime events could occur every other year due to sea level rise," Phys.com said in their coverage of the study. "Further, the flooding expected today from a once-in-a-lifetime event could occur daily by the end of the century."
Coastal habitats like marshes and coral reefs "have been shown to effectively mitigate flood risk," but decades of development eroded those natural protections.
"We've built cities and communities and our world under the assumption that these habitats will continue to protect us," explained lead author Rae Taylor-Burns, "and yet we degrade them."
Researchers explored horizontal levees to mitigate flood risk in the San Francisco Bay area and found they were up to 30% more effective than traditional levees at mitigating flood risk.
Coastal flooding has always occurred, but rising temperatures have made these extreme events more frequent and more deadly.
Climate tech investor and journalist Molly Wood has said that "climate isn't weather, and weather isn't climate," likening human-influenced climate impacts to "steroids for weather."
"Whatever was already going to happen, like droughts, floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, heat waves, snowstorms, rain — all that is still going to happen," Wood explained. "But when it happens, it's going to be worse."
Echoing the study's researchers, she continued. "Also, extreme versions of what used to be normal weather are going to happen more often."
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According to Climate Central, the "annual frequency of high tide flooding in the U.S. has more than doubled since 2000 — and is projected to more than triple again by 2050 as sea levels continue to rise."
Around 30% of Americans live near a coastline, foregrounding an imminent need to identify accessible flood mitigation strategies and make coastal communities more resilient.
Actions like installing solar panels are one way to ensure your home is more resilient in the face of natural disasters that could knock out infrastructure — and EnergySage not only offers quotes from trusted local installers, but can also save consumers up to $10,000 on new solar installations.
Getting your power from the sun also helps to avoid contributing to the type of pollution that leads to increasing global temperatures.
At the study's conclusion, researchers cited previously published findings that supported nature-based flood defenses for both efficacy and costs.
They noted that structural properties like vegetation "could reduce levee investment cost by $320 billion on a global scale," adding that previous research "suggests that restoring marsh habitat in front of seawalls" could be far less costly than raising seawalls.
"Horizontal levees could be a less expensive way to reduce the risk of levee failure with climate change, as opposed to increasing the height of the levees themselves," Taylor-Burns remarked.
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