As coastal areas face worsening climate threats, it’s become clear that resilience efforts alone will not save us entirely.
Relocating homes, communities and essential infrastructure away from the shoreline, such as these houses along the cliffs above Thornton State Beach in Daly City, may become a reality for areas where rising tides are making an impact.
“The numbers for managed retreat are compelling,” said Nicholas Pinter, professor and associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California Davis. “By many estimates, it’s tens to hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. that may be looking at this in coming decades, and it’s at least hundreds of millions on a global basis.”
In a densely populated metropolis like San Francisco, the story is more complicated. “Retreat and avoid are not necessarily going to be feasible everywhere,” said Dana Brechwald, a program manager at the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission , who is working on the agency’s Rising Tides initiative. “I think San Francisco is one of those places, and that’s why they’re investing billions of dollars into rebuilding a sea wall.
But despite local projections that show places like Bayview Hunters Point, the Embarcadero waterfront and Treasure Island will be inundated with water under warming conditions, The City continues to develop shiny new skyscrapers, stadiums and multi-story housing close to the shoreline, something that may be unavoidable given housing pressures, but may not be advisable long term.
In the past, managed retreat has not always been a fair and just process, and there are myriad examples of what not to do, said Pinter. Take Grafton, Illinois, which was flooded by the Mississippi River in 1993. “None of the low-income people who were removed moved into the higher-end housing that was made available,” he said. “That was a great case of flood mitigation, but a poor case of social justice.
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