Where Will 13 Million Americans Move?
If sea level rises six feet this century (1.8 meters) thirteen million Americans will need to move. That’s the story shown in the map above. It takes a moment to truly absorb the profoundness and implications.
The fact that it just appeared in FORBES, the most traditional of all business media, is equally important.
When my first book, High Tide On Main Street: Rising Sea Level and the Coming Coastal Crisis was published in 2012, it was often described as “a theory.” Year by year the acceptance of dramatic sea level rise has taken hold.
Now here we are with a mainstream financial publication showing a new map produced by researchers using AI, to plot which U.S. counties will lose thirteen million residents and which will gain. It is a prediction about people, economies, and the global supply chain. It is a future view of dislocation, financial write offs, humanitarian disaster, and new opportunities.
The FORBES Article has a link to the deeper scientific paper published in Plos One for those interested in the methodology. For most of us however, I think the picture is worth the thousand words.
The blue shows the counties projected to have significant flooding and lose population. The shades of red, from light pink to deep red shows population influx. (To translate the scientific legend, the exponent is the number of zeros; e.g. 10 to the 4th power, is 10,000 people and 10 to the 6th is a million.)
Six feet of sea level rise will have such a catastrophic impact, that it is hard to forecast what society, governance, and our economies will look like. We will have entered a very different era. After five thousand years of relatively unchanged sea level, any tools like this that get us to consider the adaptation ahead are useful.
We need to get our minds around the reality that sea level rise is now unstoppable. While we should get very aggressive at slowing the warming which is melting the glaciers and ice sheets and raising sea level, we have passed a tipping point. Now we need to be more sustainable, design for greater resiliency and begin adaptation. This map gives us a visual guide to the U.S. counties. A similar analysis could be done for the other two hundred coastal countries.
This need to get our heads around the new reality of rising seas and shifting shorelines is why my next book is: Moving To Higher Ground: Rising Sea Level and the Path Forward. It is due for publication this fall. (Anyone on my blog subscription will receive a free sample chapter later in the year.)