Coastal perilsNorfolk, Virginia, tries to cope with sea-level rise

Norfolk, Virginia, is home to the largest U.S. naval base in the country, and the second biggest commercial port on the U.S. Atlantic coast. Assistant City Manager Ron Williams Jr says that floods are an ever-present problem, a problem which has become worse in recent decades.

Yahoo News reports that the relative sea level around Norfolk has risen 14.5 inches (.37 meter) since 1930, when the low-lying downtown area routinely flooded.

Williams says that the floods are worse and more frequent now. The reason; the water does not have to rise as high to make the rive spill over its banks and into the city’s streets (see the Flood Awareness & Mitigation page on the city’s Web site).

The frequency of storms has increased as well. “We’ve had more major storms in the past decade than we’ve had in the previous four decades,” he said.

Now, yellow “Streets May Flood” notices are a common sight along highways, highway underpasses, in low-lying neighborhoods, and along the waterfront.

Norfolk has 243,000 residents, and Williams says the city needs to invest at least $1 billion in the coming decades, including $600 million to replace current infrastructure, to keep water from flooding the city during surges.

Cynthia Rosensweig, a NASA climate scientist who advises New York City on its response to sea surges, says the different measures the city has taken to mitigate the effect of sea level rise have made Norfolk a leader for other coastal cities on how to adapt to climate change.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says that sea levels are rising along almost every part of the U.S. coastline, except in Alaska (see state-by-state sea level trends).

A survey by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the non-profit International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) fund that while nearly three-quarters of U.S. cities see environmental shifts linked to climate change, these cities either lag behind or take a different approach than cities around the world. Yahoo News quotes ICLEI’s U.S. program director Brian Holland to say that U.S. cities traditionally have focused more on mitigating climate change than adapting to it, whereas most cities in the developing world have emphasized adaptation (seeU.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement).

MIT’s JoAnn Carmin, who conducted the 2012 survey of 468 cities around the world and their responses to climate change, said that one reason for the difference between U.S. cities and cities abroad is that, “Given the politicized view of climate change in this country, it seems that some cities are emphasizing risk management — that way they can get on with the important tasks of reducing risk and safeguarding local residents and municipal assets.”

Debating the sources of climate change notwithstanding, the Republican mayor of Carmel, Indiana, Jim Brainard, who heads the Energy Independence Task Force for the U.S. Conference of Mayors, says that municipal leaders can often reach consensus and act more decisively than some members of Congress can, because lobbyists working on behalf of the fossil fuel and extraction industries to defeat climate-related measures typically do not target mayors or other local politicians.