West Africa Scores High In Disaster Risk
West African cities, both the large and the small, are expanding rapidly and face specific challenges related to infrastructure, zoning and spatial planning, which directly contributes to an increased risk from flooding. In coastal countries, such as Guinea and Sierra Leone, soil erosion and land degradation were the priority perceived threats.
Rebuilding the Natural World: A Shift in Ecological Restoration
From forests in Queens to wetlands in China, planners and scientists are promoting a new approach that incorporates experiments into landscape restoration projects to determine what works to the long-term benefit of nature and what does not…
Zandoorlog
Sand is the new gold. The worldwide excavation of sand on beaches and in rivers and oceans is signalling an ecological and human catastrophe. A worldwide sand rush is taking place. Article by Peter Dupont. Translation by Rafael Njotea.
Lost Neighborhoods of the California Coast
Each coastal disaster is followed by the inevitable debates about whether rebuilding is the right decision.
Climate-Induced Migration Creates Perils, Possibilities
For Pacific islands like Tuvalu and Kiribati, the implications of climate change are clear, and devastating. Already, these governments have begun to plan for a future in which entire populations have to relocate as their islands vanish under the rising sea. But climate change also threatens ways of life in subtler ways, leaving families around the world to work out for themselves how to cope.
Nantucket’s Big Dig: How could it happen?
Coastal communities in the Commonwealth, as well as up and down the seaboard, are dealing with the issue of erosion and erosion control…
Global Lessons for Adapting Coastal Communities to Protect against Storm Surge Inundation
Coastal inundation as a result of global sea-level rise and storm surge events is expected to affect many coastal regions and settlements. Adaptation is widely accepted as necessary for managing inundation risk. However, managing this risk is inherently contentious because of many uncertainties and because a large number of stakeholder interests and values are mobilized…
After Hurricane Sandy, One Man Tries To Stop The Reconstruction
Geologist Orrin Pilkey predicted exactly what a storm like Sandy would do to the mid-Atlantic coast and New York City. On a tour of destruction after the deluge, he and David Gessner ponder a troubling question: Why are people rebuilding, as if all this isn’t going to happen again?
The Coastal Consciousness of John Gillis
Climate change is real and serious, but was not last fall’s “natural disaster,” like Katrina and like all the rest to come, as much about human failures, in infrastructure, planning, and our proclivity for building homes on shifting sandbars, as it was natural catastrophe? Those questions aren’t new.