It's easy to get lulled into thinking that rising sea levels threaten only people who live in distant or obscure places -- places like the Tuvalu Islands in the South Pacific where tidal floods are lapping over crops with increasing frequency, forcing people to evacuate to New Zealand.

But right in the San Francisco Bay area, the Sacramento Delta has just joined those low-lying coastal regions that are the early victims of sea-level rise. This is a typical suburban area that boasts great salmon fishing and is home to one of the stars of the UC system, CalDavis, renowned for its environmental study programs.

A CalDavis-Public Policy Institute of California study has found that it will become increasingly beyond the ability of California taxpayers to keep shoring up levies to save specific tracts of the Sacramento Delta the next time it floods.  The study suggests that these areas should be abandoned.

While conceding that this is a controversial opinion and a very difficult conclusion for property owners to reach -- especially if they had received help following floods on prior occasions -- study spokesman, Professor Jay Lund, says, "I don't see any way they are not going to be losers, so the state policy should be that we all quit losing." Landowners would forfeit their property under the plan.

When a delta levee collapsed in 2004, the state and the federal government spent a combined $75 million to repair land worth only $22 million. Richard Howitt, a UC Davis economist who helped put together the study felt that this was an irresponsible use of public funds. “Throwing a lot of money at a low-value private asset is not something you want to do with taxpayer money very often,” he said.

The participants making this tough collective recommendation represented diverse disciplines: civil engineering, climate science, economics, hydrology and biology. They established the boundary between the areas that should be saved and the places that would be abandoned to the waves.

Triage decisions like this one are already being practiced by other low-lying coastal regions facing rising sea levels and costly climate change defenses. Seaside resorts on the coast of the UK are making an almost identical cost-benefit analysis, and relocating.

Inevitably, the financial issue is rushing to the fore. Who will pay? Who should pay relocation costs? The town of Kivalina in Alaska is filing a lawsuit against oil companies for redress. The Sundurbans were already a lost cause in 2003, but little financial assistance has been forthcoming for them.

Ten percent of the world's population (600 million people) live in coastal areas that are less than 33 feet above sea level, and are facing abandonment by their insurers. Furthermore, these direct climate change costs are in addition to the heavy price we already pay to repair damage caused by natural disasters like hurricanes and floods, which have increased four-fold in the last two decades.  Clearly there's no easy answer to the question of who will pay the price of climate change, except to say that we all will, to some degree.

Artwork by Dutch Artist Jaap Vliegenthart

Via MIT Tech Review