Live on the coast? Your home might be swallowed by the sea by 2100. Now, a controversial solution used around the world could help solve the crisis before it's too late.
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00:00It gets often equated as a four-letter word in policy in planning meetings.
00:26It's like no one wants to talk about retreat.
00:29And the reality is, you know, we are going to have to move away from our lowest-lying
00:33land.
00:34There's managed retreat, which means that there's been some intervention by a local
00:50state or federal government to help folks move away from risk.
00:56On the other hand, you have what's called voluntary retreat.
01:00The places where I see this unfolding are often the poorest communities, and those are
01:05places where you have families that often for financial reasons have decided not to
01:11carry flood insurance, but then they get saddled with the repeat flooding, and it often at
01:18some point won't make financial sense for them to return.
01:21And so that's considered voluntary retreat, though I don't think it's that voluntary.
01:36And we're not going to abandon all of New York City, and we're not going to abandon
01:51all of San Francisco, and we're not going to abandon all of New Orleans, but we have
01:55to figure out, you know, what are the most vulnerable areas, and how do we help people
02:01move away from the risk of continuing to live there, both physical and financial, because
02:07our flooding is only going to get worse.
02:31Sea level in the future for all these coastal communities is that they are going to be affected.
02:41They're going to pay more taxes, they're going to pay more in repairs of their properties
02:47due to flooding, and sooner or later they'll have to move.
02:53And by that time, those properties are going to be worth nothing.
03:09A lot of people would be like, oh my God, retreat happened in New York City?
03:12And the answer is yes.
03:14All along the eastern shore of Staten Island after Hurricane Sandy, thousands of citizens
03:20who were tired of flooding came together, they started these grassroots buyout campaigns
03:26where they asked ultimately the governor to purchase and demolish their flood-prone homes.
03:32At a larger scale, part of what I think is really fascinating and promising about managed
03:37retreat is that, you know, as a climate change resilient strategy, it demands that we recognize
03:46a kind of porous relationship with the more-than-human world, and that a kind of humility, that we
03:54can't just as a species design our way out of this problem.