Be Careful How You Adapt to Sea Level Rise

A great article in The Economist on the cost of natural disasters - with a lesson for those of us working on sea level rise adaptation. The article points to decreasing deaths due to coastal protection measures (dykes, levees, etc.) but increasing natural-disaster costs because of them.

The reason? As we protect flood prone land that no one should live on (land that is full of wetlands and other flood protection "sponges") everyone wants to live on it! Perversely, government policies directly and indirectly encourage this...and we in Wetlands Watch can give you a long list of them.

So with sea level rise and/or increasing storm intensity, when these flood control measures are topped, there is more property, manufacturing, and infrastructure in the flood plain that gets destroyed.

The answer may lie in a new Dutch approach to pulling their defenses back. it is novel and winning awards.

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