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water each year. Scientists recently upped that figure to 250 billion tons. To The WThwaites sits along a 75-mile stretch of shoreline in Antarctica that serves to partially shield the vast Wwhich can only hasten the day when it collapses into the sea—their alarm, a river of warm water appears to be flowing beneath the glacier, enough to justify its nickname, the Doomsday Glacier, but there’s more. The Forty years ago, the Thwaites was thought to be shedding 40 billion tons of holds enough ice to raise sea levels by about 10 feet. This alone is scary the thwaites glacier is about the size of a u.s. swing state and AIS has enough ice to raise the seas by 200 feet.est Antarctic Ice Sheet from the warm ocean waters. it could be a
century from now, or a few decades. No one really knows.warm water was recently discovered under the Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden Glacier, which is expected to add between a foot-and-a-half and 5 feet to ocean levels in the next 200 years.next century will be tough for coastal city dwellers. Sea levels are rising about 3 millimeters each year. By the end of the century, the oceans could rise at least 2 feet over 2005 levels, according to a 2018 study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. Michael Mann, a climate scientist, told NBC News that unless We haven’t even talked about Greenland yet. Another underground river of These projections carry some uncertainty, but one thing seems pretty clear: the
million people will be living on land that is under water all or much of the time.cities around the world will be at heightened risk of flooding in the next few de-global facility for disaster reduction and recovery and an author of the report.of cities around the world that are vulnerable to climate change was published in 2013, based on satellite data captured in 2005. It found that hundreds of coastal emissions of greenhouse gases are abated, by the end of the century more than 650 cades. In the years since the study was published, risk calculations have changed for the worse, says Stephane Hallegatte, lead economist at the WCities will take the brunt of the impact. The last big survey by the World Bank One change is that cities in Africa have grown quicker than expected. That orld Bank’s
threat. In particular, Mmeans that any list of vulnerable cities would now have to include new names, on the original 2013 list have improved their prospects greatly by taking steps to protect themselves against flooding. These include Guangzhou and Shanghai in China, Manila in the Philippines, Can Tho in Vietnam and New Orleans in the U.S.like Lagos in Nigeria and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. A dangerous combination of rising seas and poverty make these cities increasingly vulnerable. Many of the cities that bedevil the east coast of the U.S., and neither has implemented adequate Some cities in the developed world haven’t adequately addressed the rising iami and New York are vulnerable to storm surges
protections. They would do well to take a page from London, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, which have in-vested in dykes, barriers and drainage systems.ing a change in how people think about flooding and plan for it. “People realize that it’s just not possible to prevent all floods, so you have to learn to live with the water and accept that it will sometimes have an impact,” says Hallegatte. “We cannot live behind taller and taller walls, because at one point, the consequenc-The worsening outlook on sea-level rise is prompt-
using the dynamics of the river deltas to distribute es of one of those walls failing becomes too big.”es in their cities for flood water to collect—to build and fail mlow density that are relatively easy to evacuate—protect areas of high population density. They are ing-with-water techniques. They are building spac-sand in such a way that maintains protective dunes. Such quasi-natural systems are both less expensive The Netherlands is at the forefront of new liv-ore gracefully than a big wall. areas of to
“It’s what we call nature-based solutions,” he says. “Instead of trying to use concrete to just protect everything, you try to use natural mechanisms.”levels, asking the same question: how to manage in-creased flooding over the next 10 or 20 years,” says Hallegatte. Here are five cities that have grown rela-tively more vulnerable in the last few years.“We see people from all continents, all incomeRecent climate projections have put some new cities in the crosshairs CITIES THAT ARE VULNERABLE TO RISING SEASby FRED GUTERL