S. Louisiana Sinking 9mm/Year; 120,000 Residents On Front Lines Of Global Warming
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Maps of southern Louisiana a few decades ago show a boot of land, not unlike southern Italy, that is all but gone now. Deprived of silt and fresh water, and sliced by hundreds of miles of deeply dredged shipping channels, the shrinking wetlands are growing less effective as natural barriers to storm surges from hurricanes, putting the area at higher risk of devastation.
"It looks pretty out here, but a storm comes along and half the land leaves," said Nicky Alfonso, 52, a commercial fisherman docked at Pointe à la Hache between the Gulf and a river levee. "We're not the scientists, but we see what's happening," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "We're losing land."
Many low-lying coastal regions in the United States face erosion and rising sea level, linked to climate change, but the Mississippi delta is particularly vulnerable because it is sinking as well.
It is subsiding an average of 9 millimeters (0.35 inches) a year, 50 percent faster than had been thought two years ago, according to Tulane University geologists, who described the coast of Louisiana as one of the "most vulnerable" in the world. "We are in a race against time in Louisiana," Governor John Bel Edwards said in March, announcing LA SAFE - which he said could become a national model for threatened communities.
"A few of our most vulnerable coastal communities will need to contemplate resettlement over the next 50 years, while others are likely to experience population and economic contraction as a result of ongoing land loss and sea level rise," he said.
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http://news.trust.org/item/20170705070223-njp4c/
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