Sea Level Rise
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sEA lEVel riSE A CRUCIAL CHALLENGE FOR THE FUTURE OF CITIES AND COMMUNITIES, ECOSYSTEMS, AND THE HERITAGE, IN OUR WORLD UPSET BY THE COVID-19 OUTBREAK Published by cHAPTER one 6 Climate Change and Sea Level Rise: will be COVID-19 a game-changer? 10 Sea Level Rise: Causes, Institute of European Democrats Impacts, and Policies 4 Rue de l’Industrie - 1000 Brussels - Belgium +32.2.2130010 - [email protected] 14 VENICE’S CASE: A HISTORIC ICON InstituteofEuropeanDemocrats AND CLIMATE CHANGE’S DESIGNATED @IED_IDE VICTIM; THE CITY’S EXEMPLARY www.iedonline.eu HISTORY POINTS THE WORLD TOWARDS MORE EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS 18 Urban Heritage & Climate Resilience With the financial support of the European Parliament. Sole liability rests with the author and the European Parliament cHAPTER is nor responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein. two Project Coordinator 24 IPCC - Intergovernmental Panel Elena Giacomin on Climate Change: Special Report Editing on the Ocean and Cryosphere Andrea Alicandro in a Changing Climate 2019 Graphic Design 33 Climate Change: Riccardo Bizziccari Global Sea Level ISBN 978-2-9602546-0-0 38 Mediterranean UNESCO World Heritage at risk from coastal flooding and erosion due to sea-level rise 46 Economy- wide effects of 136 Can the Dutch save coastal flooding due to sea level the world from the danger rise: a multi - model simultaneous of rising sea levels? treatment of mitigation, adaptation and residual impacts 142 Climate change to raise costs for 58 Global and European US muni bond issuers sea-level rise 144 Floods and coal clashes 64 Early Last Interglacial ocean spotlight climate threat warming drove substantial to financial sector ice mass loss from Antarctica 146 leaving is no longer 72 Ocean Risk and the optional Insurance Industry 150 the sea, lapping 104 How Cities are Using at the front door Architecture to Combat Flooding cHAPTER 157 ApPENDIx ThrEE 112 Half of the world’s beaches could disappear by the end of the century, study finds 115 2050 Climate Change City Index 126 Seas Threaten 80 Airports Around The World 130 Sea level rise accelerating along US coastline, scientists warn 132 Climate change: can the insurance industry afford the rising flood risk? cHAPTER one Climate Change and Sea Level Rise: will be COVID-19 a game-changer? Francesco Rutelli Three key elements stand out in the public debate: President IED, Institute of European Democrats 1. How should the international community interact? The glob- al co-operation remain very weak, weeks after the WHO decla- Countering and limiting the effects of rising sea and ocean ration marking the upgrade of COVID-19 from epidemic to pan- levels is an important part of the crucial commitment of our time demic. The battle for everybody’s health, rather than provoking to mitigate and adapt to Climate Change. a strong commitment to multilateral collaboration, has been the Is it too much of a challenge to be truly engaged with the de- subject of national strategies and diverse operational approach- cision-making and strategic actions of rulers and public actors? es, frequently in contrast with each other. This battle is the result Is it too late to issue political agendas pinned to the results of the of conflicting visions and positions – in the best of cases – and of next elections? How can we leave the vicious circle where mat- individual governments’ Soft Power to determine who has acted ters that affect everybody’s future appear negligible compared most effectively; most responsibly; most transparently; most col- to the impending emergency that afflicts the international com- laboratively, etc. These competing narratives, used as self-serv- munity? ing tools during the crisis, are destined to become even more To answer these questions, we need to link the content of this disruptive in the aftermath of the pandemic. And, please, don’t publication with the global COVID-19 emergency. The crisis that forget the risk of new medical and scientific geopolitical compe- has paralysed the world since March 2020 hasn’t happened out titions, rather than indispensible co-operations. of the blue: all the conditions for it to arise were in place, and 2. The fast-paced entry of the global community into the era in addition we were caught unprepared, without adequate pre- of universally transmissible infections that are capable of tempo- ventative or counter-measures. rarily halting social relations, trade, and entire production and The climate crisis is already underway and it will certainly services sectors, has also put democratic procedures on hold bring the consequences analysed in this work, among others. in various parts of the world. This translates into closed parlia- Unless we manage to take the necessary, widely-known meas- ments, elections postponed or suspended, and the centralisation ures in a rational, planned and shared manner, we will not be of exceptional and interim powers in the hands of the rulers in of- able to stop and reverse the current course of events. fice. This is a globally shared need, not only because people are Since we started working on this volume, the global context worried or scared, but because the state of emergency is real. has changed dramatically. As we will see shortly, the contents It creates an extended mandate, certainly not unrelated to the of these pages are not less, but more relevant and topical than recent trend of increasing popular support for models other than ever. liberal democracies, and in many cases, towards authoritarian We had started in the aftermath of the events – and conse- and coercive models. quent worldwide attention – that struck the iconic and fragile In a general context of assertive sovereign approaches – al- city of Venice in November 2019: an exceptional Acqua alta, with beit conceptually weaker compared with the need to collabo- serious consequences for the city’s life and economy and for a rate in finding answers to increasingly supranational, complex cultural heritage that belongs to Humanity. and integrated problems – the global governance rhetoric and A few weeks later, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic the narrative of recent decades that is favourable to open econ- changed the terms and perception of global priorities, due to omies and open societies are often being disavowed. its impact on human lives and the disruptive economic conse- 3. However, there has been an increase in general awareness quences. Europe is having to make life-changing decisions as a about global threats that until a few weeks ago were being passed political and institutional community. off as hoaxes. Or rather, even though President Trump gave this definition regarding Climate Change, the global public opinion 6 thinks otherwise. According to international surveys, very few per- the leakage and transmission – and possible adaptation to hu- ceived the risk of global viral pandemics, but 68% of the people mans – of viruses ‘imprisoned’ in glaciers formed millennia ago, interviewed considered Climate Change a ‘major global threat’ or in the vast territories where permafrost will inevitably thaw.3 (with 20% considering it ‘a minor threat’; for a total of 88%).1 Fiction literature and cinematography have been in charge This leads us to think that the post-COVID-19 period will bring of anticipating some of these scenarios for some time. It’s inter- greater attention to the need to face global threats which un- esting to see that the disaster movie Outbreak (1995, with Dustin til recently were indeed considered ‘distant’. In fact, they have Hoffman, Kevin Spacey, Rene Russo, Donald Sutherland, Mor- proven very close to our real, current and daily life, and not only gan Freeman) doesn’t open with apocalyptic imagery but with to future scenarios. Global and integrated problems have lasting a quote, the result of a pioneering life of research and scientific effects. Sovereignist and “immediate” narratives have become discoveries by Nobel laureate and bacteriologist Joshua Leder- more contentious now, and are being questioned in light of the berg, who declares that ‘The single biggest threat to man’s con- effects of global integration. tinued dominance on the planet is the virus’4. There are at least two essential lessons It is unlikely that in future years what Sonia Shah anticipated to consider in light of the Coronavirus (she has authored Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Chol- pandemic; one is the environmental issue; era to Ebola and Beyond; and the forthcoming The Next Great the second is governance. Migration: the Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move) will actu- ally occur: ‘for decades, we’ve sated our outsized appetites by Let’s go back to the topic of Climate Change. encroaching on an ever-expanding swath of the planet with our Recent events are linked to the dynamics the Anthropocene, industrial activities, forcing wild species to cram into remaining as Nobel prize winner Paul Crutzen’s and the scientific communi- fragments of habitat in closer proximity to ours. That’s what has ty define it: the new Era that we inhabit, where men are capable allowed animal microbes such as SARS-COV2 – not to mention of changing the balanced pre-existing ecosystems – in many re- hundreds of others from Ebola to Zika – to cross over into human spects, irreversibly. bodies, causing epidemics. In theory, we could decide to shrink The debate is intrinsically connected to: the age of globalisa- our industrial footprint and conserve wildlife habitat, so that an- tion; the growth of the world population which currently stands imal microbes stay in animals’ bodies, instead’5. However, politi- at 7.7 billion people; and the involvement and physical interac- cians and citizens must focus on the urgent search of a lasting tion through trade, travel and migration among practically every compromise between shared well-being and the environmental population on the planet.