When a particularly high tide lands on a beach in northern Los Angeles County, there is no dry sand left to stand on.
It’s named Broad Beach, even though it has been disappearing steadily for decades.
“I think there are another 10 stairs below the sand right here,” said Michael Quill, marine programs director at nonprofit LA Waterkeeper.
Quill comes here to Malibu, California, to study sea level rise and beach erosion. He’s stopped halfway down the staircase to avoid getting wet. Behind him are multimillion-dollar luxury beachfront homes perched on stilts above the crashing waves. He is standing in line with a row of boulders that’s supposed to keep the water at bay.
On this day, it’s, not working. The waves crash over the rocks and seawater washes between the stilts that support the houses.
“I’d be kind of concerned if I’m sitting there in that house, and the water is going under three-quarters of my house,” Quill said. “I mean, it’s just a matter of time.”
Since the late 1800s, sea level has risen globally by about 8 inches. It’s expected to rise about another foot by 2050. Along some of California’s coast, that means as much as 5 feet worth of beach per year could be eroding by 2050. A report from the Union of Concerned Scientists finds that 2.2 million U.S. residents will be affected by rising tides by 2050.
And by the end of the century, that rate could triple.
“We still, unfortunately, are seeing this risk fly under the radar,” said report co-author Rachel Cleetus with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “And we know that because we’re continuing to operate in a business-as-usual fashion along our coastline.”
The report finds that nationwide, at least 1,100 pieces of critical infrastructure — schools, hospitals, power plants — could be flooding monthly by 2050 because of sea level rise.
“I’m not even talking about storms, which make things even worse, but just regular high tide flooding,” said Cleetus. “The kind of flooding that will come on just a sunny day.”
The recommendations in the report include elevating buildings, flood-proofing them, and if necessary, relocating them.
That last idea is known as managed retreat. It’s really unpopular, said Miyuki Hino, a city and regional planning professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill..
“People love where they live and are not always very open to things changing where they live,” Hino said.
Relocation is also expensive. Studies — including the one from the Union of Concerned Scientists — argue it’ll save cities and residents money in the long term, but it can be more tempting in the short term to limp along, hoping tomorrow won’t bring a catastrophic flood. That’s what’s been happening in Southern California, where the main defense against sea level rise is temporary: just add sand.
Managed retreat isn’t a major conversation in Malibu yet. Flooding roads and wet beachfront homes are still reserved for especially stormy days, but the dwindling strip of Broad Beach’s sand suggests those hard conversations are creeping closer.
“With climate change, we don’t really have an option of just leaving everything the way it is,” Hino said “If we do nothing, the impacts will be worst.”
