How Miami Can Survive Climate Change

Tim Robustelli and Shahin Vassigh, an architecture professor at FIU, wrote for Future Tense at Slate on the well-established—if ambitious—adaptation policies that Miami can adopt to better live with climate change in the coming decades.

Absent large-scale adaptation, things will become increasingly catastrophic for Miami. Worst-case projections for 2100 from the research group Climate Central show South Beach completely inundated and generally uninhabitable, while downtown Miami and nearby residential neighborhoods could experience near-constant street and first-floor flooding. Under this scenario, nationally-critical infrastructure, including Miami International Airport’s runways and the Port of Miami’s cargo docks, will disappear. Additional saltwater intrusion in the Biscayne Aquifer, which is already happening, could deprive South Florida of its primary source for drinking water. And tides could eventually encroach Miami from both the Atlantic and the Everglades.

If these dreary, calamitous predictions come to fruition, they mean billions of dollars in damages and property loss, climate gentrification and increased inequality in higher-elevation neighborhoods such as Little Haiti, and untold political and social instability as nearly 1 million people become displaced. Eventually, a direct hit by a mega-hurricane could simply wipe an increasingly dilapidated Miami off the map.

But a bleak future as the “American Atlantis” isn’t inevitable, as long as the region’s leaders and residents take action to survive into the 22nd century. Many of the efforts proposed or underway right now are wholly inadequate to deal with climate change in South Florida. Instead, Miami must rip up its current plans, drastically reimagine how it can live with rising waters, and devote unprecedented resources to transform itself into a new-age Amsterdam (dare we say: Miamsterdam?) or Venice.

Read about the measures that Miami can implement to survive and thrive well into the next century here.