Cost(s) of protecting La. community

On a rainy August in a New Orleans neighborhood, Jordan Stadler, a late 20s life-long resident of southeast Louisiana, spent the night ferrying people to safety in his grandfather’s canoe. Rising water had stranded neighbors at their doorsteps, but the water wasn’t due to high river levees. It’s just New Orleans, and there's nowhere for the water to go. Stadler has since had second thoughts about investing in NOLA properties. He’s been flooded from various homes five times since he was a kid. Lafitte, a coastal region, home to four historical coastal communities, is about 30 miles downstream, where flooding is worse. Between 1973-2010, rising seas and eroding coastlines has brought the Gulf of Mexico 4.5 miles inland. The region is home to four historic coastal communities. The flood risk is high, but so is its cultural value. The costs and challenges of protecting this region are the focus of a recent paper by Christopher Siverd and scientists at Louisiana State University, which was published last January in the journal Climatic Change. They modeled flood risk for Lafitte based on future sea level rise and storm surge forces of 2012’s Hurricane Isaac. Lafitte is protected by nine miles of raised earthen barriers/levees. In 2012, Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority proposed building a ring of levees (29.5 miles long) to protect the area, but the contentious project carries a hefty cost. The LSU researchers know about what it would cost, per person, to really save Lafitte from rising seas, thermal expansion and melting polar ice caps, and subsidence, a phenomenon that causes the ground surface to sink due to underwater oil and gas extraction and lack of new sediment. By 2110, proposed levees would have to be about 26 feet high in the face of a hurricane of Isaac’s strength. The cost of this measure, if the population of Lafitte stayed constant, would exceed $300,000 per resident - about $1.4B for all 4,700 people of Lafitte. In the interim, the state is losing about 100 yards of wetlands every 100 minutes. A 2010 report by Earth Economics found these wetlands provide ecosystem services worth between $12B and $47B annually. (Source: Massive Science 04/23/20) https://massivesci.com/articles/flood-new-orleans-louisiana-lafitte-hurricane-cost-climate-change/