(InvestigateTV) — Billions of dollars are going to save coastlines in crisis, but scientists warn climate change could sink their efforts.
One of the states with the highest stakes is Louisiana.
Since 1932, for a variety of reasons, Louisiana has lost an estimated 2,000 square miles of land, roughly the size of Delaware.
To save its rapidly disappearing coast, the Bayou State is spending billions of dollars on, arguably, one of the world’s most ambitious environmental restoration efforts.
However, a recent study, published in Nature Communications, finds a majority of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands are unable to keep up with rising sea levels.
“We have to address climate change,” said Torbjorn Tornqvist, the Vokes Geology Professor in Tulane’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “And for us, there is more at stake than for most other places around the world.”
Tornqvist co-authored the study warning that rising seas pose an urgent threat to the world’s coastal wetlands.
The findings show that the future of marshes and other low-lying coastal areas depends heavily on whether global warming, since the start of the industrial age, can be limited to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
The paper finds coastal areas are unlikely to keep pace with sea level rise exceeding about one-quarter of an inch per year.
“How the global wetlands will look by the end of the century in the year 2100 will depend very, very much on how much warming is going to happen during that time,” Tornqvist said.
The study finds temperatures higher than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit would likely lead to widespread collapse of the world’s marshy areas, mangroves and reefs, with sea levels rising at double today’s rates.
“Wetlands cannot keep up with those rates,” Tornqvist said. “They will probably drown within perhaps, half a century.”
The dramatic rates of land loss have, so far, had relatively little to do with what most people think of a sea-level rise.
Scientists tell us that since 1900, the seas have risen by an average of 5-8 inches. Some areas of Louisiana’s delta sank by several feet during that time.
The state hopes to reconnect the plumbing, through projects like a three-billion-dollar effort to pump river water into wetlands south of New Orleans.
Critics of the project fear massive amounts of fresh water and fertilizer runoff would devastate fisheries.
“It breaks my heart to know that people don’t care that we’re going to lose our livelihoods,” said Oyster Grower Mitch Jurisich. He points out that pumping mud builds land quickly; versus the years it will take for a diversion of water to produce results.
“We won’t be able to tell people, ‘I told you so’ and the generation that comes up behind us won’t know any better,” said Jurisch.
However, experts warn the state’s effort to battle the rising seas is a fool’s errand.
“The danger is we’re missing out on the big picture and the big picture is if we don’t address climate change, we’re going lose all our fisheries,” said Tornqvist.
Their research also finds the threat of rising seas extends from the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico up to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina.
Copyright 2024 Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
This post was originally published on here
