| By Manuela AndreoniSenior Newsletter Writer, Climate |
Over the past few weeks, flooding from storms has battered cities in the South and the East Coast, from Louisiana to New Jersey. Overlapping atmospheric rivers over the West Coast have brought heavy rains that are likely to come back in the next few days.
So far this week, Californians have not seen the kinds of weather-generated disasters that struck last winter, with flooding in Ventura County in December and in San Diego in January, my colleague Jill Cowan reports.
Storms are part of the natural cycle that replenishes the water supplies that several states will rely on during the drier months to come, Judson Jones, The Times’s meteorologist, told me.
“The problem comes when there’s too much at one time,” he said.
Climate change makes that a lot more likely. Warmer air holds more moisture, which means storms in many parts of the world are getting wetter and more intense, as my colleague Ray Zhong explained during deluges last year.
Coastal areas are especially vulnerable to climate change, not just because of storms and floods, but from rising seas and erosion. These factors put a tenth of the world’s population, the 896 million people who live near the oceans, at risk. That includes one-fifth of Americans.
The good news is that there is a lot we can do. Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank that promotes environmental policies for coastal cities, has designed a framework that lays out dozens of solutions that governments and communities can implement.
“So often people assume that we need more technological innovation, or we need huge amounts of more money before we can actually do anything meaningful,” the group’s co-founder, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, said. But, she added, “There are so many solutions that we already have at our fingertips”
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