For Release Sunday, May 2, 2010
Citiwire.net
NEW ORLEANS – Even with aggressive action on climate change, scientists agree that a global temperature rise of some kind is inevitable, triggering sea level rise, more intense storms, and an array of other chain-reaction disruptions to life as we know it. And in the typically sinister way that the climate cataclysm plays out, these impacts will hit hardest in the places most people live.
More than half of the U.S. population lives in 673 coastal counties. In China, the world’s most populous nation, 60 percent of the country’s 1.2 billion people live in coastal provinces. Worldwide, rapid urbanization in coastal and delta mega-cities includes widespread informal settlement, a recipe for disaster for the most vulnerable populations.
The good news is that planners are paying attention. Cities, as places of density and transit, can make great strides in mitigation, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. But coastal cities must engage in adaptation on a parallel, and in many ways integrated, track. There is no more urgent role for planners in the years ahead than to plan and help implement adaptation to climate change, says Edward Blakely, the former recovery director for New Orleans.
Coastal cities are already well aware – some painfully aware – of the breadth of the problem. Jakarta is confronting annual flooding that strains a colonial-era layout, and Dhaka in Bangladesh has struggled with stronger typhoons. At the Yantgze and Pearl river deltas in the Shanghai and Hong Kong regions, chronic flooding, coastline erosion and wetlands deterioration, storm surges, and punishing storms are wreaking havoc on areas that have been attracting the most intense in-migration and urbanization. Sewer overflow and saltwater intrusion, with impacts on drinking water, public health, and agriculture, are key areas of concern, as well as the vulnerable infrastructure, such as power plants, port and refining facilities, that will be flooded and potentially permanently underwater in the decades ahead.
