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. The Staten Island project is expected to cost $615 million.
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). Seawalls are not only expensive to install but need regular maintenance if they are to withstand the prolonged barrage of pounding waves. But in many places they are considered vital to protect land and property that would otherwise be swept out to sea. High tides batter the seawall at Butterfly Beach in […]
