It's ironic that shorefront property to include, golf courses, airports, railheads and subways, seaports, military bases, government buildings, homes, hotels, and most urban infrastructure once considered the very epitome of a status symbol is rapidly becoming worthless because FEMA flood maps are no longer insurable, mortgagable or salable.
Every storm more houses wash out to sea.
Despite this, some major financial groups mislead as to the time frame for the flooding continue to build infrastructure in coastal cities. We don’t have a hundred years, or fifty or even a decade left before that proves to have been overly optimistic.
Most people can observe the flooding is increasing at an increasing rate.
Images of people in Miami, Bangladesh, Amsterdam, Venice, and Oceania, are being supplemented with images from Maine to the BOS-WASH corridor, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia. Relocating our cities provides a better chance for saving them than trying to build higher seawalls and levees, flood gates and drainage into the suburbs.
To relocate our cities we might begin putting our new infrastructure on ring roads located more than sixty meters above existing sea levels.
People whose property is less than sixty meters above the FEMA flood maps flood zones may need to get creative to write off their bad investments and put them on taxpayers. We should resist that displacement of responsibility.
The flooding is of course not limited to actual buildings that might flood,
its inclusive of utility corridors, roads, railroads, connectivity of important transportation, communications, and political authority. Wildlife may lose their habitats and fisheries. Aquifers will be affected.
In some cases, as when for example we lose our ports and our fisheries it may cut off thousands of miles of distribution networks.
