In the coming century,* New Orleans will be surrounded by ocean. That’s the contention of a paper published this week in Nature Sustainability. It finds that the city has already passed a “point of no return.” The authors recommend taking immediate action to start relocating the more than one million residents there and across coastal Louisiana who are being placed “in harm’s way” by the rapid loss of coastal wetlands, a loss increasingly driven by rising sea levels. The study suggests that the “widespread conversion” of low-elevation coastal zones in the Mississippi Delta into “open water” is “probably unavoidable.”
“Between the chronic stress of land loss and sea level rise, New Orleans’s days are numbered—at least as we know it today,” said Jesse Keenan, a co-author of the paper and an expert in climate adaptation at Tulane University. To some extent, this transformation is already happening: Louisiana is losing a football field’s worth of land every 100 minutes. New Orleans has lost 25 percent of its population since 2005, when Hurricane Katrina caused more than 1,500 deaths and more than $150 billion worth of damage. Some neighborhoods are sinking by as much as two inches per year.
