Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Rising sea levels are erasing familiar boundaries. In fact, conservationists may find themselves fighting for lands that will soon be under water. With little room to maneuver between encroaching development and rising waters, it may be time to consider proposals that run headlong into conventional environmental wisdom.

Story by Jim Robbins
Illustration by Tim O’Brien
April-June 2009

When NOAA published its latest climate change research in January, it might have been tempting to file it away as just another dire prediction. The researchers found that, if CO2 emissions continue to rise throughout this century, the consequences will include dramatic increases in sea level, diminished drinking-water supplies, and conditions that rival those of the 1930s Dust Bowl. These days, it’s easy for findings like these to get lost in the seemingly constant stream of grim forecasts, but it would be a mistake to overlook how one of the paper’s key conclusions encapsulates a profound challenge to the environmental community.

The researchers found that, even if global emissions were halted at century’s end, the CO2 concentrations would lock in rising sea levels (among other things) for at least a thousand years. This poses a stark question to conservationists and environmentalists, who have stubbornly argued that reducing emissions is the only appropriate response to climate change—adapting to a changing planet has been seen as tantamount as surrender. But like it or not, the NOAA study underscores that the world is irrevocably changing. The question is, can environmental thinking change along with it?

Although it’s too early to know the answer, some conservationists are starting to accept that it’s time to stop resisting and start adapting. It’s a controversial view, in part because putting adaptation into practice means abandoning long-standing conservation projects in favor of forward-thinking strategies that may or may not work. One of the first places this philosophical shift is playing out is in Florida, where, in an illustration of dilemmas the entire world may soon face, sea-level rise is expected to strike early and often.

Even the most conservative climate models predict sea levels will rise one meter by 2100, which would swamp Florida’s barrier islands and much of its southern tip. A three-meter rise would put much of South Florida, including Miami and Fort Lauderdale, under water. Either scenario means rising waters will force the rapid displacement of people living along Florida’s coast, not to mention many of the state’s endemic species. Similar changes will be seen worldwide; rising waters will likely force millions of people to move inland while inundating millions of hectares of wetlands, islands, and coastal marshes. If current projections are to be believed, this will happen not in some distant future but within a human generation.

That has led Reed Noss, a Central Florida University professor, to position himself at the leading edge of the shift away from traditional conservation. Noss and his colleague, Tom Hoctor, have started sketching out a large-scale plan to preserve much of Florida’s biodiversity, even in the face of massive population shifts. In what he dubs “managed retreat” from the sea, Noss is calling for the surrender of coastal zones to the ocean, for the preservation of areas that would provide habitat to species once they’ve fled inland, and for the development of new property easements based not on where people live today but on where they will live once climate change reworks the landscape.

Such innovative proposals deliver an early glimpse of not only what adaptation strategies might look like but also of the painful tradeoffs that will accompany them. Noss’s ideas, for instance, run headlong into a multibillion-dollar plan to restore the Everglades, even though a huge swath of the swampy land could soon be under water.

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