Malibu Needs $67 Million To Fight Ocean Rise, Scientists Claim
Written by 991KBU on June 21, 2019
Defending Malibu against rising seas will cost about 67 million dollars and require two miles of seawalls.
That’s according to a new study that estimates that the cost of armoring the California coast would be at least $22 billion.
And for the entire United States … more than $400 billion.
And that’s just a “minimum down payment for short-term defense against rising seas in California,” according to a study released yesterday by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Climate Integrity .
They hired an environmental engineering firm called Resilient Analytics to examine the coastal maps … and calculate the cost of seawall construction in areas threatened by inundation.
More than a half billion dollars would be needed to harden the coastline along 60 miles of coast along Los Angeles County.
That would be 43 miles of seawalls.
Another 400 million dollars for Ventura County … where 16 miles of coastline would need walls or other structures.
Mapping specialists at the University of Colorado generated the estimated costs of constructing seawalls to protect infrastructure in the United States from sea-level rise.
They used a sophisticated sea-level rise model … estimates of a 1-year storm surge estimates .. and the NOAA Medium Resolution Shoreline dataset.
TheCenter for Climate Integrity says this is the first-ever estimate of the costs of coastal defenses for the entire tidal shoreline of the contiguous United States.
And they say this prediction is far from the worst case scenario.
This study only measures the cost of building seawalls to protect infrastructure (such as roads, buildings and homes) from moderate and not worst case sea-level rise and coastal flooding over the next 20 years.
We have a link to an interactive website that describes the study … posted at the KBUU Newswire.
