A climate adaptation scientist is warning that drastic changes may be necessary along the American East Coast. 

What's happening?

According to EcoRI, Emma Gildesgame, a climate adaptation scientist for The Nature Conservancy, believes that it's time to start talking about managed retreat as a response to climate-induced coastal change. 

Managed retreat is when coastal buildings and towns pull back from their original locations, relocating further inland in an attempt to avoid being submerged by the rising oceans as our planet gets warmer. The practice is often seen as a last-ditch attempt to salvage areas that are most impacted by rising oceans as our coastlines shrink. 

However, per EcoRI, Gildesgame says the time is coming sooner than we think and that the goal right now is to "work with nature to keep people safer from climate change."

Why is managed retreat important?

For the United States, sea levels are expected to rise by a foot by 2050 if we continue along our current path, according to the Earth Information Center. That means that as time goes on, more and more coastal towns and cities are going to find themselves threatened by the same seas that they've relied on to thrive for decades or longer. 

On top of that, with sea levels rising, issues like flooding become more commonplace, with storms needing to be less and less severe to cause widespread flooding and damage. Managed retreat is a way to stave off those problems and keep towns safe from our changing climate.

While extreme weather events have always existed, experts have found that human activities like burning dirty fuels have caused our planet to heat up, supercharging weather events and creating the need for proactive safety measures as temperatures rise. 

What's being done about managed retreat and rising ocean levels?

Gildesgame said she's been having conversations for years about starting the process of managed retreat from coastal towns in New England. 

"I think it was like 2022 that I started having these conversations," she told EcoRI. "People were like, 'Oh, we can't talk about that. It's too complicated.' Governments don't want to be in the business of telling people where they can and can't live. There's deep, deep, deep trauma around government relocation in a lot of communities."

However, she noted that people are realizing the severity of the situation. 

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"We're tough New Englanders. We'll be fine. We'll just build stronger," Gildesgame said. "But we're dealing with something completely unprecedented."

The hope is that by moving communities away from the shore, it will reduce the strain on the natural ecosystem in the area, restoring natural beaches, salt marshes, and sand dunes to mitigate the spread of flooding. 

As for the wider issue of coastal erosion and rising oceans, our best course of action is to continue prioritizing the reduction of carbon pollution, in the hopes of slowing our changing climate down.

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