4 FL Counties Don't Give A Damn What Rubio, Scott Or Bush Say; Planning For Rising Seas Anyway
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The rate of sea level rise along the East Coast is accelerating three to four times faster than the global average, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, making Florida’s situation even more dire. But the real reason Floridians have to worry about sea level rise is that so many of them live on the state’s coastlines. About 75 percent of South Florida residents — around 4.12 million people — live along the coast, and 2.4 million of them live within four feet of the tide line. By 2030, the risk of a storm surge at the four foot mark will more than double. “There’s good reason to believe southern Florida will eventually have to be evacuated,” Ben Strauss, chief operating officer of Climate Central, said in 2012. His warning was echoed a year later by Harold Wanless, chairman of the department of geological sciences at the University of Miami, who proclaimed famously in a June Rolling Stone article that “Miami, as we know it today, is doomed.”
Those predictions, however, aren’t what the leaders of the Climate Compact focus on when they go to work each day.
Hefty has been part of the compact since the four counties joined together in 2010, as has Jennifer Jurado, Director of the Natural Resources Planning and Management Division in Broward County. Jurado said before the counties came together, the way they were addressing these issues wasn’t lining up: the maps of sea level rise baselines were different, and the strategies being used to try to quantify the impacts of sea level rise were inconsistent.
Once they came together, however, Jurado said that all changed. With the help of Florida Atlantic University and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the counties developed a unified projection for sea level rise in the region and a Regional Climate Action Plan with sea level rise goals and objectives that could be adapted to each county’s needs. Broward adopted the action plan first, followed by Monroe, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach — all within a one-year time frame, which Jurado says is “exceptional” for the region. The main benefit of the compact, Hefty said, has been the coordination of these efforts among the four counties, which all face similar threats from sea level rise but are different enough to require plans that are adaptable to each county’s needs.
“We’ve really been able to leverage each others’ resources and rely on each other and ask each other for assistance and information,” she said. “It’s been a really synergistic effect in my opinion, because if it was just me talking about climate change, we wouldn’t have the coverage and the broader voice that we do when we’re talking from the perspective of four counties that make up 30 percent of the population of the state.”
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http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/21/3432588/south-florida-fighting-sea-level-rise/
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