Time and tide have no respect for vulnerable coastal residents
Properties put at risk as rising sea level increases storm surges in Europe
Bryony Nierop-Reading has what she calls a million-dollar view from her cliff top property in east England, looking out over North Sea swells beyond a sandy beach where gulls wheel overhead.
The drawback: The place is all but worthless.
Her bungalow was demolished by the local council after a December 2013 storm bit a 10-meter chunk out of the cliff, leaving her home perched over a void. She now lives in a camper parked at the back of her property.
"It was devastating, with the tidal surge and the demolition of my house," said the 69-year-old grandmother, standing at the edge of a 20-meter cliff face of soft yellowish earth. "I feel bitter about it."
All the more so because she passed up a one-time local government offer to buy her out. Now she's out of options: Current British law "does not confer ... any right to protection from flooding or coastal erosion," as the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs puts it.
The law in question, the 1949 Coastal Protection Act, is becoming outdated as rising sea levels lead to worsening storm flooding and coastal erosion. With no legal obligation to protect coastal residents, the British government relies on a cost-benefit calculus to determine which areas warrant investment in sea walls, revetments and other protective measures, and which don't. Rural populations wind up getting little help, while big cities tend to get a blank check of protection.
"We are trying to fix a problem with a 70-year-old tool kit," said Malcolm Kerby, head of the National Voice of Coastal Communities, a Happisburgh-based group that speaks on behalf of rural communities vulnerable to rising seas.
In the absence of a modern tool kit, some seaside communities are experimenting with programs meant to help adapt to coastal erosion by luring people to retreat. In Happisburgh, the local council offered Nierop-Reading a chance a few years ago to sell her place for more than twice what she paid for it and move to stable ground. Most of her cliffside neighbors took up the one-time offer; she didn't, and she's unable to rebuild on what's left of a lot that no one will buy.
Daunting choices
Sea levels have risen an average of 20 cm globally over the past century as a result of glacial thaw, polar ice melt and the expansion of water as it warms, according to the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. For much of Europe, higher seas are aggravating storm surges like those that battered Britain last winter - setting up daunting political and economic choices about what to do in response.
At Lowestoft, about 30 miles south of Happisburgh, the sea has risen 10 cm since 1962, based on readings from a tide gauge there. It's one of at least 105 gauges worldwide to show an increase of 10 cm or more during the same period, according to a Reuters analysis of data from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level, based in Liverpool, England. The analysis encompassed annual sea level readings from 229 tide gauges worldwide with data covering a 50-year period.
In Europe, the largest increase was at Dieppe, France, a city on the English Channel. Like Happisburgh, its cliffs are crumbling as seas rise. A gauge in the harbor showed an increase of about 20 cm since 1960.
Around the world, the biggest increases were in Asia, reflecting the greater impact in that region of subsidence, the process by which geological forces and the extraction of groundwater cause the land to sink. Near Bangkok, Thailand, a tide gauge showed an increase of nearly 91 cm since 1959. In Manila, the Philippines, the sea level rose about 82 cm.
As the rising waters take a worsening toll, European governments and local authorities are forced to ask: What's our coastline worth? And can we afford to defend it all?
About 200 million people - 40 percent of the European Union's population - live within 50 km of the sea, and the numbers are growing. In some parts of the Mediterranean coasts of Spain and France, the population jumped as much as 50 percent from 2001 to 2011.
(China Daily 12/16/2014 page10)
