The context you need, when you need it

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

Levees can no longer save New Orleans

The city is part of “the most physically vulnerable coastline in the world.”

This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately, as the city has reached a “point of no return” that will see it surrounded by the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a stark new study has concluded.

Ongoing sea-level rise and the rampant erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up the New Orleans area within a few generations, with the new paper estimating the city “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century.”

Low-lying southern Louisiana faces multiple threats, with rising sea levels driven by global heating, compounded by strengthening hurricanes, also a feature of the climate crisis, and the gradual subsidence of a coastline that has been carved apart by the oil and gas industry.

Why we still don’t yet know how bad climate migration will get

Southern Louisiana is facing 3–7 meters of sea-level rise and the loss of three-quarters of its remaining coastal wetlands, which will cause the shoreline “to migrate as much as 100 km (62 miles) inland,” thereby stranding New Orleans and Baton Rouge, according to the study, which compared today’s rising global temperatures with a period of similar heat 125,000 years ago that caused a rise in sea level.

This scenario makes the region the “most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world,” the researchers state, and requires immediate action to prepare a smooth transition for people away from New Orleans, which has a population of about 360,000 people, to safer ground.

Louisiana has already experienced population loss in recent years, and this trend will accelerate in a disordered way, the paper warns, should no action be taken to confront the perils faced by its largest city and surrounding communities.

“While climate mitigation should remain the first step to prevent the worst outcomes, coastal Louisiana has evidently already crossed the point of no return,” added the perspectives paper, published in the Nature Sustainability journal. A perspectives paper is a scholarly article that provides an assessment, rather than new data.

Billions of dollars have been spent to fortify New Orleans with........

© Vox