Looking Ahead For What Awaits Florida - Specifically, What Awaits Monroe County, Florida (Keys)
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Dr. Jayantha Obeysekera, director and research professor in the Sea Level Solutions Center, Florida International University; Dr. Ben Kirtman, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami; and Thomas Ruppert, coastal planning specialist with Florida Sea Grant joined hosts Tom Hudson and Melissa Ross on the Florida Roundup. They discussed how Florida lawmakers are responding to the threats caused by climate change and gave predictions about how climate change may directly Florida residents in the coming years.
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The Florida Roundup: Thomas Rupert, let's focus for a minute on the Florida Keys, where officials earlier this month announced what many coastal governments around the country have been worried about — but haven't come out and said publicly — that as seas rise and flooding gets worse, not every community, not every neighborhood can be saved. And they say in some places it just doesn't make financial sense to try. How can what's happening in the Florida Keys be interpreted when we look at the vulnerabilities all around Florida?
THOMAS RUPPERT: It goes back to the fact that they were the ones that saw some of the worst impacts on the ground. So ironically, even though we have missed a lot of time when we could have been preparing better for sea level rise and the impacts of climate change, it's still interesting that it's taken actual specific events on the ground to really make our local governments change in most cases. I think that's, unfortunately, one of the lessons that we're taking out of this. And so, we're really missing on time that we could have spent planning and trying to implement long term adaptations. And now we're not going to have as many years to do that.
The Florida Roundup: Can you follow up when you say specific facts on the ground? What are you referring to?
RUPPERT: Some colleagues and I were actually working with Monroe County back in, I believe it was 2015, and we were talking about civil rights and we were talking about their road infrastructure. We were trying to work with, to convince them, to adopt some sort of approach to how are they going to deal with their roads and the maintenance liabilities that they might have to the public for those roads. And they really weren't all that engaged. Then in the fall of 2015, the high tide that fall came in much, much higher than predicted. And you had neighborhoods going underwater for weeks at a time and that suddenly the county commission was all about talking about this work that was going on. And now we've seen the same thing here in 2019 in the lead up to the 10th annual Southeast Climate Compact Summit. You have a neighborhood right now there in Monroe County again, that's been underwater for about 100 days. So they see these things and that really pushes them forward.
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https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/post/record-heat-and-king-tides-look-ahead-florida-s-climate-future
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