“A few of our most vulnerable coastal communities will need to contemplate resettlement over the next 50 years, while others are likely to experience population and economic contraction as a result of ongoing land loss and sea level rise,” he said. “We are in a race against time in Louisiana,” Governor John Bel Edwards said in March, announcing LA SAFE - which he said could become a national model for threatened communities. It is subsiding an average of 9 millimeters (0.35 inches) a year, 50 percent faster than had been thought two years ago, according to Tulane University geologists, who described the coast of Louisiana as one of the “most vulnerable” in the world.įactbox: A $50 billion wish list to keep Louisiana coast above water Many low-lying coastal regions in the United States face erosion and rising sea level, linked to climate change, but the Mississippi delta is particularly vulnerable because it is sinking as well. “We’re not the scientists, but we see what’s happening,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “It looks pretty out here, but a storm comes along and half the land leaves,” said Nicky Alfonso, 52, a commercial fisherman docked at Pointe à la Hache between the Gulf and a river levee. Maps of southern Louisiana a few decades ago show a boot of land, not unlike southern Italy, that is all but gone now.ĭeprived of silt and fresh water, and sliced by hundreds of miles of deeply dredged shipping channels, the shrinking wetlands are growing less effective as natural barriers to storm surges from hurricanes, putting the area at higher risk of devastation. Instead, the river is lined by levees, or raised banks, that rush its water past the delta into the depths of the Gulf. The delta that fans into the Gulf of Mexico, formed from silt carried by the Mississippi River, is subsiding and is no longer replenished by the powerful waterway. It is asking coastal residents how they would like to adapt to changes predicted in the next 10, 25 and 50 years. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Many work in the energy or commercial fishing industries, where depressed prices are costing jobs, he said.īlink, 30, volunteers with LA SAFE (Louisiana’s Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments), a $40 million project funded by the U.S. “They’re worried about putting food on the table within the next two weeks and not what’s going to happen 50 years from now.” “Most people, they’re trying to live their life,” said Richie Blink, who lives in Empire, a town on a skinny stretch of river delta laced with canals to the Gulf. Warnings that Louisiana is losing more than 10,000 acres - equal to 10,000 American football fields - of wetlands each year are often met with skepticism, distrust and resignation.
They face difficult decisions over whether to stay and fight, or flee their diminishing land - yet even getting their attention to the looming threats is no easy task. Some 120,000 people live on the most vulnerable shrinking lowlands south of New Orleans, fishing for shrimp and crawfish, harvesting oysters or working in the shipyards, oil refineries and petrochemical plants along the river banks and Gulf shores. Withered, blackened cypress and oak trees, succumbing to an invasion of salt water, turn once lush land into eerie ghost forests. Thomson Reuters Foundation / Ellen Wulfhorstįishing channels widen as barrier islands disappear, and unremarkable rainstorms leave roads flooded. Rudy Gravois, a descendant of the Cajuns who settled in south Louisiana in the 18th century, hunts and fishes in its maze of bayous, South Vacherie, Louisiana on June 6, 2017.
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