PerspectiveThe Sea Is Rising. Can You Save Your Town?
That headline is also your mission in The Ocean Game, the LA Times’ deceptively simple online simulation of city governance in the face of climate change. The game accompanies an in-depth look at how various California coastal communities are responding to the effects of rising seas caused by global warming. California may not be the most vulnerable part of the world that will experience the effects of sea-level rise in the coming decades, but the problems it faces are not at all trivial.
That headline is also your mission in The Ocean Game, the LA Times’ deceptively simple online simulation of city governance in the face of climate change. The game accompanies an in-depth look at how various California coastal communities are responding to the effects of rising seas caused by global warming.
Thomas Gaulkin writes in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that California may not be the most vulnerable part of the world that will experience the effects of sea-level rise in the coming decades, but the problems it faces are not at all trivial. According to the Times, more than $150 billion in private and public property may be underwater by the end of the century, including two-thirds of Southern California’s beaches. Critical habitats for birds and endangered species could disappear forever.
Rosanna Xia’s full report is well worth reading. She focuses on the challenges facing individual cities like San Francisco—where “the cost of building levees, seawalls and other measures to withstand six and a half feet of sea-level rise and a 100-year storm could cost as much as $450 billion”—and Imperial Beach, which added 300,000 cubic yards of sand to replenish its beaches, but will eventually have to retreat inland.
