their prep. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. The view from above shows
the stakes for communities on the coast. The lines
between us and the water are already thin and lately
those lines are breaking. Mhm. The US faces ever
stronger storms that destroyed homes and lives exposing
just how vulnerable our coastlines and cities really
are under the growing impacts of the changing climate
But a new generation of american infrastructure is
trying something different, dealing with climate change.
By accepting climate change. And the gulf coast
Louisiana aims to turn the tide of rapid land loss by
harnessing the power of water to actually create new
land. It's literally an existential threat to our
coastal communities. Will they exist in the future in
10, years And in new york city, an ambitious new
project is meant to protect hundreds of thousands o
people And a $500 billion dollar business sector. A lot
of the resources that we need to really be able to take
proactive action flow quite reactively after a disaster
to deal with future flooding and sea level rise. New
york is creating more urban spaces built to soak up
flooding and a new coastal barrier to safeguard th
city. These projects are all part of a new idea for
dealing with climate threats that the only way ahead
might not be stopping the water, but instead living
with the water. This is the beginning of what will be a
10 ft wall built into these tiered parks that they ha
along the east side here, the east coast of resiliency
project. It's it's a 2.4 mile long project that will
protect 100 and 10,000 people in a community that was
really impacted by Hurricane Sandy 28,000 of whom live
in public housing. Mhm. Right. How important was
Hurricane Sandy and changing How the city thinks about
storm preparedness and climate change. Yeah. What
Hurricane Sandy did was unlocked the federal dollars
that we needed to really move those plans into action
and that's kind of an unfortunate policy environme
We're in the cities that are furthest ahead on this
work are places like new york city in new Orleans that
have recently experienced disas and were able to
unlock those federal dollars to build protection and
build resiliency with both federal and city funding.
This project's price tag will run at least $1 billion.
Its supporters say it's a worthy investment to protect
against far costlier damage. That means protecting
against another. Sandy or Ida or Katrina, deadly storms
that punched through levees and old barriers to
flooding. Whole cities felt the impacts. But especially
those cities working class and minority neighborhood
lower lying and with less green space to absorb the
water. The storms destroyed homes and upended lives the
trees are blown down, water rising powers out. We did
not think it would be so bad. It's terrible for the
community here. Yeah, the big y in new york city is a
new kind of flood protection at least new for the U.S.
It creates an elevated outline of parks and green space
around much of Manhattan to stop storm surge and to
soak up flooding. And it borrows a tactic from the
dutch designating one area to contain flooding with the
aim of protecting other areas. This really represents a
new class of infrastructure for new york city. This is
part of our essential part of our response to the
impacts of climate change. What we've learned from our
own experience here in new york city is that every
waterfront neighborhood is unique. We have 100
waterfront neighborhoods and the strategies that we
need to use to protect our coastal neighborhoo
probably as diverse as the neighborhoods themselves
Our goal is not to wall ourselves off from the wat
We're waterfront city. We have 520 miles of coastline.
Um but rather integrate flood protection. Yeah. What
are those things that you see internationally and tha
you've been able to adopt and maybe tweak a little bit
for new york city We often get asked have you learne
from what the dutch have done in the Netherlands And we
have, but what we found is that these kinds of projects
have never really been implemented in a dense urban
environment like new york city. So they really not only
represent a new class of infrastructure for new york
city, but maybe one of the first of their kind globall
This construction site is just the beginning of a grand
reimagining of Manhattan's wate The big you is
the master plan and its master planners come from the
BRk ingles group, an architecture firm based in Denm
and in dumbo or Brooklyn from a ski slope built on a
clean energy power plant in Copenhagen. Two new designs
for a floating city in Malaysia. The firm aims to
counter climate threats through what it calls social
infrastructure. What was the pu of the big you The
big use uh, in reaction to Superstorm sandy, which of
course hit the coast in the fall of 2012 after
Hurricane Katrina, the Corps of Engineers came in and
just basically decided to build higher levies. This is
not just building taller levees or taller concrete
walls. It really needed to consider and address this
urban condition that is new york. And so we created
what we call a social infrastructure. It's thi
that you could create infrastructure but it has anoth
side benefit that is for the social well being of its
inhabitants. So there are actually areas that are built
uh 2-3 blocks inland that have these floodgates and
that allows for both people to move from one side to
the other. But in those times of emergency, you can
lock those down and that entire compartment is uh is
protected, keeping the water there as opposed to
further and lend it's more flooding. Mm humanity has
lived with water for millennia as we become more smart
about what water means to us and we see it as something
that is going to start to impact us the same way that a
snowstorm impacts us when it gets winter. We can then
decide on where are we going to invest Where are we
going to protect Where are we going to retreat Where
are we going to store uh, these large amounts of wate
What are the limits of a project like this and
addressing those core issues The flooding soul storms I
think it's really important never to consider that one
project is going to do everything. This is not a total
solution. It's not a one stop shop for a solution
resiliency and water issues. They come from everywhere
they come from the sky down. So all the rain that hits
Manhattan needs to be dealt with. Mm I would say there
are probably hundreds of projec that all have to work
in alignment to really truly have a resilient city. If
we look at New York City as you know this, this area
has been now built over the last 3-4 centuries, then
it's going to probably continue to be a very important
urban center for the next centuries. So, this is an
investment in the future of the city that then future
generations will of course have to relate to and and
possibly build on top of uh, depending on, you know,
how things go with sea level rise. The global
challenges of climate change require global solutions
But the coastal communities facing these challe
come in all shapes and sizes and they're finding their
own ways of living with the water far from the dense
urban coastline of new york. Another mindset shift is
harnessing the power of water to reclaim the land
that's sinking under rising sea levels. No state faces
greater coastal risks than Louisiana, where the ocean
swallows a football field of land every 30 minutes and
where hurricanes can consume entire islands to form a
defensive ring along its coast. Louisiana is changing
course on a century long effort to control the might of
the Mississippi River, instead creating new projects
that aim to restore the water's natural flow and feed
soil back to rapidly vanishing coastlines. T
understand how Louisiana's abun water flow can move
soil back out to the areas that need it. State
officials turn to a vast laboratory at Louisiana St
University where researchers study the Mississippi
River and Louisiana coast by recreating it. And
Minister mhm. A lot of these areas used to get fresh
water and because of man made, where there was oil and
gas, timber or pressures, those freshwater flows were
changed. And so, you know, kind of major project type
in the master plan is trying to reconnect some of tha
where you're saying, okay, this is going to turn to
open water can actually be slowed down or stopped if
you can just reintroduce fresh water back in the system.
So after decades of kind of constricting the flow of
the Mississippi river. Now, it seems like the focus is
these projects that sort of imitate what the natural
flows would be. Right, right. No, that's exactly right
That's right. The idea of a lot of them, particularly
the river sediment version of the hydrological
restoration et cetera, are about letting the river do
what it used to do. Two of them kind of major types of
projects for for the state's Coastal Master Plan, ou
marsh creation projects and river sediment diversions,
both of those require sand. Okay, and so in particular
with the physical model, we're helping the state
understand how that sand moves down the river. So, can
you tell me a bit about where we're standing righ
So we're in Barataria Bay and this is one of the
regions in coastal Louisiana that really has been
impacted the most by the disconnect of the river from
the wetlands have been cut off from the Mississippi
River. Right, So this area is, you know, was built, you
know, when the Mississippi River was, you know, unless
he'd or you know, um and was free to kind of flood its
banks and deposit water sediment nutrients around here
was bringing earth to this. It was exactly the other
part is kind of the fragile nature of the lower mos
Mississippi River. I think that's the other part is
this area is subsiding a lot. And when you combine that
subsidence with future sea level rise with the fact
that you're not getting a lot of sediment um to nourish
water sediment to nourish those lands. You know that in
essence that thread keeps getting thinner and thinner.
Mhm. For Louisiana protecting the coastline also means
rebuilding the coastline in some cases literally
building up islands that will protect communities and
vital industries. But to get earth and sediment out to
the far reaches of the state, Louisiana has to harness
the power of the Mississippi River, breaking the
out of the straitjacket of levees. It's been kept in
for the past century and embracing the power of water
not to destroy land but to create it. Getting out to
the far reaches of this coastal line of defense
involves a journey by sea and by land to a barrier
island in the making. Yeah, as you're walking around
here definitely uh get the sense that this is all
fairly recent. It's still a pretty sloppy muddy
foundation, but it's the beginnings of a land recovery
effort that will stretch across the Louisiana coastline.
We're almost basically in the gulf of Mexico huh
Another another 100 ft south of here and we would be in
the gulf. What we're doing is we're restoring the beach
dune and some of the marsh habitat along here. So th
muddy sloppy earth out here is the base layer basically,
this is this is the base layer. Uh So and what we have
in in a lot of our case in Louisiana, we have a
sediment deficit problem is there is subsidence that
going on. We have a delta environment. So our delta
subsiding at the same time, sea level is rising. So how
do you make up that difference of the land going
underwater In this case you pump some more sand in this
area, you build the elevation backup. This island
provides that first line of defense against storms that
come for our coastal communities. It does seem like
there's a lot of action on this front in Louisiana. It
seems like there's some political willpower behind it.
Uh You know, what do you what do you chalk that up to
Is that there's a certain urgency or immediacy
immediacy to it here that we haven't seen in other
parts of the country. There's a tremendous urgency an
people see people who live out in the coast and work
and play in these areas. You go on a boat ride and you
see areas that 5, 10 years ago, it was marsh and now
it's open land. Your the map on your GPS might not have
been updated but the landscape is updated and people
see that and they know it and that's why there's
tremendous support behind these projects. Our coastal
Master Plan has been approved unanimously by our
Legislature. Think about that, that's not a red issue
or a blue issue. Everybody understands the impor
of restoring our our barrier islands and and our
natural ecosystems and doing everything we can to
protect our communities, uh, particularly as you've
seen the land loss crisis that we have in Louisiana,
that probably nowhere else has had the landlines crisis
that we have. So it's literally an existential t
to our coastal communities. Will they exist in the
future in 10 2050 years These are the types of projects
that will make that existence possible in the futur