From Spain’s Mediterranean seafront and the river banks of the Netherlands to both coasts of the US and the edges of India, China and Mozambique in Africa, climate change is leaving few coastal communities on the planet untouched. Already there are six-bedroom Edwardian houses falling into the sea in Norfolk, England, as a result of accelerated coastal erosion, while developing world shanty towns, such as Pedro Dias in southern Honduras, are being washed away due to bigger than expected floods.
New York and London are among the 22 cities, including Mumbai, Kolkata, Karachi, Miami and St Petersburg, that the UK government’s recent Stern Report tipped to face increasing risks of coastal surges and flooding as the earth warms by 3°-4° from the 2050s. It also announced that floods from rising sea levels could displace up to 200m people.
Yet while the news centres on predictions for the future, the real story is that a rising number of residential areas are already suffering from the impact of more erosion, higher sea levels, storm surges and increased risk of flooding, much of which is prohibitively expensive to insure against. “Extreme weather records are being broken every year and the resulting hydro-meteorological disasters claim thousands of lives and disrupt national economies,” says William Cosgrove, vice president of the World Water Council, the Marseille-based think tank. The number of major flood disasters, for example, has risen relentlessly. There were six in the 1950s; seven in the 1960s; eight in the 1970s; 18 in the 1980s; and 26 in the 1990s.
The death of more than 700 people during floods in Mumbai last year was a sign of an already worsening pattern, according to the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. “Heavy and very heavy rain events over central India have increased significantly since the 1950s,” says B.N. Goswami, a professor at the institute. “Also, the magnitude of the very heavy events in a given year has shown a clear increasing trend.” The shanty towns were worst hit, with hundreds of makeshift homes destroyed in the Bhimwadi and Shivashakthi slums, leaving thousands homeless.
On the other side of the world in New Orleans, 200,000 properties, including whole apartment blocks, were destroyed by 2005’s hurricane Katrina, which, according to scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was an indication of how strong and destructive future US storms might be as a result of global warming. Stories from California also foretell the problems to come. As a result of El Niño, coastal erosion has advanced rapidly and many cliff-front bungalows, often made from just timber, have toppled into the Pacific Ocean.
In the Outer Banks of North Carolina the American dream of a holiday home by the sea is also being swept away, literally. Sam Twiford’s family used to spend summers at two cottages set back several hundred feet from the Atlantic Ocean. “My parents bought them in the 1950s, and they were very rustic, made from wood, with an outdoor shower,” he says. “We would go down there for six to 10 weeks reading and swimming.”
In the 1960s the sea began to erode the sand significantly and the cottages had to be moved closer to the road and put on stilts. This only delayed the inevitable. The foundations finally gave way a few years ago, by which time “the beach had lost 80ft to 100ft”, Twiford says.
European countries are also having to deal with the problem of having so many citizens living near the sea. According to the European Environment Agency (EEA), a third of the population of the European Union member states lives within 50km of the coast and many properties and people are already being affected. Homes in Normandy, France, overlooking the English Channel are being abandoned and Spaniards are thinking twice about acquiring anything on the costas. “I wouldn’t buy a house in La Manga . . . because I doubt that my children would be able to use it. It’s a bad investment,” says Raúl Medina, the co-ordinator of a recent Spanish environment ministry report showing that Spain’s beaches are expected to shrink by an average of 15 metres, or 50ft, by 2050 as global warming causes sea levels to rise and stronger waves and currents eat away at the sand.
It’s not just the coastal areas that are at risk. As seas rise, so do rivers, and twice in recent years those in the Netherlands have brimmed to the very tops of dykes because of heavy winter run-offs, forcing the emergency evacuations of hundreds of thousands of people. Borgharen, a small village close to Maastricht, at the southernmost tip of the Netherlands, is situated in the flood plain of the river Meuse and for years its water has regularly seeped into residents’ cellars and sometimes their living rooms. But in December 1993 even Borgharen was taken by surprise as an almost unprecedented 3,000 cubic metres of water rushed past every second. The village was completely flooded. In the whole province of Limburg, 10,000 people had to flee their homes. Statistically, this discharge was only expected to occur once in 150 years. Yet two years later, in January 1995, the waters of the Meuse were again at the same level, while the Netherlands’ largest river, the Rhine, was experiencing a record discharge of 12,000 cubic metres per second, necessitating the precautionary evacuation of almost 250,000 people.
In the UK, as in the Netherlands, three-quarters of people live by the sea, and the EEA recently increased its estimates for rising sea levels for the country. More than 1m flats and houses, 82,000 businesses, 2.5m people and 2m acres of agricultural land, worth about £120bn in all, are thought to be at risk from flooding and coastal erosion. From the medieval towns of Shrewsbury and Bewdley that face an increased risk of overflowing rivers to the old fishing village of Marske in Redcar and Cleveland, which could lose up to 35 listed building, significant history is under threat. “Climate change is happening now and we need to act now to manage it,” says Stephen Haddrill, the director-general of the Association of British Insurers. “Flooding is expensive, disruptive and distressing.”
Since the great flood of 1953 on the east coast of England, which killed more than 300 people, government policy has been to hold the line by building hard defences such as sea walls to keep the sea out and protect vulnerable communities at all costs. The ABI promotes such measures, although a recent report claimed that current defences were inadequate, noting that a big storm in Hull, on the River Humber, would cause flooding to about 4,000 properties at a cost of £266m, while expenses following a wider coastal flood in the UK could be £16bn.
Increasingly, however, experts are condemning sea walls as economically impossible and counter-productive. “The sea still needs somewhere to go,” explains Philip Rothwell, the head of coastal defences at the EEA. “In some areas, allowing the sea to flood more might be the better option, as it will take the energy out of the surging water, which will better protect coastal communities.”
The National Trust, which owns 1,130km of coastline, has already made tough choices at Birling Gap, on the chalk cliffs of the Seven Sisters in Sussex, demolishing coastguards’ cottages, relocating the residents and allowing the coastline to evolve naturally. “We have always lived by the sea but we have also moved our communities when they become vulnerable,” says Ellie Robertson at the National Trust. “Still, we have to manage that retreat because there are social costs as well.”
Losing a few metres every month to accelerated coastal erosion, Beach Road in Happisburgh on the north Norfolk coast is a prime example of how climate change can turn thriving settlements into virtual ghettos. “We’ve lost 26 houses over the past 10 years and there are six at risk now. One good storm this winter and they will go,” says Clive Stockton, local councillor and landlord of the local pub.
He explains that the wooden revetments put up as a sea wall in the 1950s have eroded and been removed. A consultation in the mid-1990s aimed at replacing them got bogged down in mixed priorities, with some nature groups wanting the coast to go back to natural processes. The delay meant it is now too expensive to build defences. “Every pound they spend must be saving more than a pound in assets,” Stockton says. And, without protection, house prices have tumbled. One property was revalued a few months ago at £1. Residents can’t sell up and move out even if they want to; they just have to wait until the sea reaches their houses, at which point the structures will be razed and they will be given a council property instead.
Diana Wrightson, who runs the guesthouse and café on Beach Road, has lost an estimated £250,000 of equity in her home and business and expects both to be demolished in the next few years. “It’s us, then two bungalows, then the sea. The sea is also behind us, so is approaching from two directions. When we opened about 20 years ago, it seemed to be in an ideal situation close to the ramp with access to the beach. Now that ramp has crumbled. We’ve been left stranded. [So] we’ve already started renting another property up the coast, not by the sea, and we are gradually moving our things over to it. It’s financially difficult but we want our independence. There is a young family close to us and it is worse for them. They’ll still have to pay off their mortgage even if their house is demolished.”
Across the English Channel along the white cliffs of Haute-Normandie, which extend from the Seine Bay to the south to the town of Ault-Onival, the French are finding a more humane solution to the fallout from accelerated coastal erosion. A street in the coastal community of Criel-Sur-Mer, perched literally just metres away from the Normandy cliffs, has suffered a similar fate to Beach Road but while residents have lost their homes they haven’t lost their investment. According to Jean Mauger, the mayor of Criel, under the Barnier Act 1995, everyone in France pays 12 per cent extra on top of their housing insurance, which goes to a centrally managed fund. The act anticipated a range of natural disasters around the world where French citizens might lose their homes but would need compensating in order to buy elsewhere.
“Criel-sur-Mer has been among the first examples of application of this measure in France. From 1995 to 2003 a total of 14 houses were abandoned and their inhabitants relocated. The originality of this expropriation process is that the indemnification rate does not reflect the real market value – which tends to decrease when the risk becomes imminent – but was based on its ‘riskless’ market value, which preserved the interest of relocated families,” he says.
Decisions are made at the commune level in France and the mayor was able to access the fund to provide compensation to the residents so they could move further inland. The cliffs will continue to retreat and provide valuable sediment to protect the valleys behind, which are a higher priority as they contain the much larger settlements of Dieppe, Saint- Valery, Fécamp and Le Tréport – which lie below the high water level during spring tides. This risk has become higher still since the establishment of two nuclear power stations – Paluel and Penly – along the shoreline.
Many other communities around Europe are also providing creative solutions to climate change. For centuries the Dutch have been building dykes to protect themselves from the sea and rivers, which are more likely to flood as sea levels rise. But now they are designing homes to live with water rather than against it. The villagers of Maasbommel, near Arhmen, still pray each day that waters won’t topple their 12ft dyke, as they did in the 1953 flood, bursting 50 such defences and killing more than 1,800 people. But 36 homeowners are now worry-free, living in houses on the wrong side of the dyke but designed to float.
Each house is made of lightweight wood and the concrete base is hollow, giving it ship-like buoyancy. With no foundations anchored in the earth, the structure rests on the ground and is fastened to 15ft-long mooring posts with sliding rings, allowing it to float upward should the river flood. All the electrical cables, water and sewage flow through flexible pipes inside the mooring piles.
Chris Zevenbergen of Dura Vermeer, the company behind the project, says floating houses could help make up the 40 per cent shortfall in land suitable for development over the next 50 years. Concrete bunkers beneath the buildings will store flood water for reuse and Zevenbergen says that in times of national emergency the land “can be flooded safely. The government recognises you cannot stop floods from happening, you can only control the impact,” he says.
He believes that The Netherlands will have 20,000 of these homes over the next 20 years. With a starting price of €260,000 for a house with three small bedrooms, they are at the high end of the market for a village like Maasbommel. But owners save on insurance and have more peace of mind, Zevenbergen says. “We have found people from the middle classes willing to buy them.”
Anne van der Molen, one of the first buyers, says she loves the beauty of the flood plain area, especially it’s proximity to the river. “We moved here because we liked the countryside. The house design just helped us to live where we wanted without the risk of losing all our possessions in a flood.” She’s even excited at the prospect of her first big storm. “We haven’t had one yet but hopefully we will get one this year. Then we will go up in the house. It will be exciting. We will have a party.”
It’s clear that the challenges of climate change are not insurmountable. But without the right support communities and lives can be destroyed, as in Happisburgh. Chris Stockton believes that communities can’t just be left to fend for themselves in the face of such overwhelming odds: “Happisburgh is a harbinger of a much more serious problem. We have to rally together and help each other, or hundreds of sustainable communities will just disappear in the years to come.”
