Coastal cities are key hubs for global trade and the world economy. But they are also among the settlements that are most at risk in the coming decades due to climate change: rising sea levels, extreme weather events fueled by the crazy temperatures expected in the coming years. The dangers have long been known, but what is being done to adapt coastal centers to the new climate challenges? Not enough, at least according to a new study just published by an international research group in the pages of Nature Cities.
The study, coordinated by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, is based on a systematic review of the available scientific literature, which has allowed to evaluate the efforts of adaptation and reduction of climate risks implemented by 199 coastal cities around the world. And the results are not encouraging: in the majority of cases analyzed, the cities are in fact working only in reaction to past and present dangers, instead of working to prevent future risks predicted by climate models.
The sea inside the houses: “We must take the countries and move them”
Most of the cities studied are also moving too slowly, and with interventions that underestimate the risks predicted by climate scientists for the coming years. The main enemy considered by adaptation initiatives has been rising water levels, while for the danger of floods, extreme weather events and coastal erosion, efforts are very often still more theoretical than anything else.
In industrialized countries, it is mainly city authorities that lead the fight against climate change, working on infrastructural interventions that aim to increase the resilience of urban centers. While in developing countries, for which the data available in the scientific literature are even much less, initiatives are mainly left to the population, who tend to do what they can by raising the level of individual homes in response to floods, or by creating emergency response groups within individual communities.
According to the authors of the research, the results reveal that the current climate adaptation scenario in coastal cities is fragmented and shows insufficient interventions, which often only take into account risks that have emerged in the past, and not those predicted by the most recent climate models. For this reason, further research would be needed to assess which climate adaptation interventions could give the best results in the future and how adaptation in coastal cities can be accelerated and made more effective, especially in developing countries.