By 2025, New York’s Staten Island will be fortified by a towering seawall running 5.3 miles along the coast, an engineering feat designed to ward off a growing threat.
The climate crisis is predicted to create more powerful and extreme weather systems all over the world, and coastal engineers are racing to respond with structures to reduce their impact.The first seawalls were built centuries ago, though there are now, arguably, greater assets to protect and more people living along vulnerable coastlines than ever before.
A recent report by the Center for Climate Integrity estimated it could cost the US more than $400 billion over the next 20 years to protect coastal communities.That’s a lot of money to invest in shorelines that naturally move and change with tidal flows.
“Where you have these public and private interests colliding in a contested space, like the coast, that faces ordinary weather events being compounded by climate change, people will look for a solution that gives them as much security as they can hope to achieve,” said Tayanah O’Donnell, a senior lecturer at the Australian National University (ANU).
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