The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is now working to protect against climate change by establishing more resilient infrastructure in high-risk American cities, a top agency official revealed on Thursday.
"Increasingly, we've moved not only from a security focus to a resiliency focus," said Caitlin Durkovich, assistant secretary at the department's Office of Infrastructure Protection, during a panel at the Rising Seas Summit conference.
Attendees discussed ideas on building resiliency against rising sea levels and other climate related issues.
Hurricane Sandy's widespread destruction of Northeastern U.S. coastal towns prompted the department to review the task of rebuilding with a new focus: "baking in resilience from the get-go," reported Reuters.
For those 400,000 New Yorkers who currently live in a floodplain, rising sea levels can do billions of dollars in damage to infrastructure. If climate change causes the sea level to rise by 2.5 feet by 2050, the number living in a flood plain could increase to 800,000. New Yorkers are still rebuilding from the damage caused by Sandy in 2012, and the dense urban environment makes fortifying the infrastructure even more difficult.
Durkovich said a team of specialists, including city planners and the National Academy of Science, have been assembled to begin developing better tools for planning.
Regional efforts are also currently underway, which aim to "assess resilience of infrastructure and judge where gaps in adaption and preparedness may be."
One example of risk assessment currently being conducted by the department is in the Portland, Maine area, where an effort is being taken to determine how floods could be mitigated to prevent saltwater intrusion into bodies of fresh water, Reuters reported. "The results will then be shared with other coastal communities," said Durkovich.
In California, which has the second longest coastline in the country, there is a need to protect two San Francisco Bay airports from flooding, said Ken Alex, senior policy advisor and director of the California Governor's Office of Planning and Research, who also spoke at the Rising Seas Summit event.
Additionally, the port city of San Diego has a major military installation that needs protecting, and ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach provide one in six jobs in southern California.
Estimating sea level rise is a tricky and complicated task, and predictions are often heavily disputed by critics.
However, the most current data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in 2013, estimates that sea levels will rise by 28 to 98 centimeters (roughly one to three feet) by 2100.
