Louisiana is shrinking as Climate Change softens up the already-vulnerable Gulf coast [View all]

[Bill USA]

[font size="4"]This will only Get Worse[/font]


http://texas.construction.com/yb/tx/article.aspx?story_id=188608188

"I revel in every moment I'm out on the beaches, the bayous, the ponds," says Al Duvernay, 61, a life-long Louisianan. A retired oil industry worker, Duvernay now volunteers for efforts to rebuild the land sinking under the waves, a retreat he has seen firsthand over the course of a lifetime spent on the Mississippi River Delta. "Another part of me is compelled to come back here, because I know it is all going away."

In the past eight decades, Louisiana has lost 1,880 square miles of coastal marshes, or an area about the size of Manhattan every year. With another hurricane season upon us, it is land that Louisiana and the nation can ill afford to lose. The same threat of lost barrier islands and wetlands stalks more than half of the coastal properties of the continental United States, extending from Maine to Texas. But here in southeastern Louisiana, it's at its worst.

USA TODAY traveled to this place where the Mississippi meets the Gulf of Mexico as the sixth stop in a year-long series to explore places where climate change is changing lives.

"The sea is rising and the land is sinking," says Louisiana's state climatologist, Barry Keim, based at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. "The two together mean that wetlands are disappearing here at unprecedented rates worldwide." Add in the threat of more powerful hurricanes spurred by climate change, Keim says, "and you have to worry about the past repeating itself here."

"Louisiana is in many ways, one of the best examples of starting to see some of the near-term implications of climate change," says environmental policy expert Jordan Fischbach, of the Pardee RAND Graduate School in Pittsburgh, part of the team that last year developed tools for the state to decide what coastal restoration projects to pursue. "In some ways, I feel like it is the canary in the coal mine because they are seeing effects that change people's day-to-day lives."
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