Last October Miami Beach declared a climate emergency. Citizens who had urged the city to take that action see it as a first step toward convincing the city to do more to slow carbon emissions and climate change, The Miami Herald’s Alex Harris reported.
Over the next two decades climate change will increasingly threaten Florida’s 8,500-mile coastline and its $1 trillion economy. E&E’s Daniel Cusick, in an article picked up by Scientific American, wrote: “New modeling by Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan economic think tank, reveals that ‘100-year floods’ could occur every few years rather than once a century in many locations, endangering an additional 300,000 homes, 2,500 miles of roadways, 30 schools and four hospitals.
RFF contends that Miami will become “the most vulnerable major coastal city in the world,” with hundreds of billions of dollars in assets under assault from winds, storm surges, coastal flooding, and sea-level rise.
What will Miami Beach do to combat its emergency? We should get a glimpse of the possibilities within the next few weeks after Jacobs Engineering Group Inc., an engineering firm hired by Miami Beach to review its climate-adaptation strategy, releases its final recommendations.
The audience will include a number of American cities that confront similar challenges, among them New York, Norfolk, Va., and Charleston, S.C., Arian Campo-Flores reported in The Wall Street Journal. Because Miami Beach is farther along than many of them in feeling the effects of climate change and trying to respond, its experience could provide lessons.
In recent years, Miami residents have become familiar with a phenomenon called a “king tide,” a higher-than-normal tide caused by specific alignments of the sun and moon. “Under a full or new moon, the tide becomes so elevated that combined with sea-level rise the water filters through the drains flooding the streets of downtown Miami,” Irene Sans, a meteorologist at WFTV, said in a Twitter message. The worst flooding occurs in September, October and November, Washington Post reporter Matthew Cappucci wrote. And it can happen even on a sunny day.
Miami Beach started addressing the threat in 2014. Lying an average of four feet above sea level on porous limestone, the city is especially vulnerable. The grim reality: Sea levels are projected to increase as much as 21 inches by 2040, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Climate experts praise Miami Beach—a diverse, international city with wealthy sections—for devoting $1 billion to tackle the problem, Campo-Flores reported. The city installed bigger storm-water pipes and new pump stations to push rainwater out to sea. It also began elevating sea walls and raising roads in the lowest-lying areas to address sea-level rise. The roughly $1 billion program is funded by a combination of sources, including bonds and residential and business utility fees.
The Sunset Harbour neighborhood, which overlooks Biscayne Bay and often flooded during the highest tides, was the first commercial and condo area where these measures were implemented. Since January 2017, after the project was completed, the area has avoided 85 flooding incidents that would have occurred without the changes, said Roy Coley, the city’s public works director.
A January 2020 study commissioned by the city and led by consulting firm ICF International Inc. estimated that raising roads in the neighborhood increased condo values 11.9 percent.
But Campo-Flores reported that residents are split on what the city should do. Some say that proposals to raise roads as much as about five feet above sea level and add storm-water pumps with generators the size of vans would create unsightly intrusions and a potential drag on property values.
So the mayor and city commissioners face a dilemma: How far can they go in accommodating those homeowners’ concerns without undercutting the city’s long-term viability? “We will have to have the political will to make unpopular decisions,” City Commissioner Ricky Arriola told Campo-Flores.
Our nation desperately needs elected officials willing to vote for policies that will pay off down the road. We have not seen much of that wisdom in Washington. By now it should be clear to almost all members of Congress that we need national policies that combat climate change--and that the longer these politicians sit on the sidelines, the more our health and prosperity will suffer. The time has come to put an honest price on carbon emissions.