LEILA FADEL, HOST:
New Orleans is a vibrant city, home of the French Quarter and the birthplace of jazz.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO MISS NEW ORLEANS?")
LOUIS ARMSTRONG: (Singing) Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?
FADEL: It's hard to imagine that it all might disappear.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FADEL: Yet that's the verdict of a study published this week in the Nature Sustainability Journal. It finds that sea-level rise means the city could end up being surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico by the end of the century. Jesse Keenan is one of the study's co-authors. He's the director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University, and he joins me now. Professor, good morning.
JESSE KEENAN: Thank you so much for having me.
FADEL: Is New Orleans doomed?
KEENAN: Well, what we see is that currently atmospheric temperatures are roughly where they were during the last interglacial, about 125 to 150,000 years ago. Now, there's a lag between global temperatures and sea-level rise. But when we begin to add it up, there's a recognition that New Orleans has a matter of generations to prepare for a transition north to the mainland and away from the coast.
FADEL: So a transition. Is relocation the only option for New Orleans?
KEENAN: Well, we don't really get into the engineering specifics, but it's generally agreed that it would be nearly impossible to engineer a multi-purpose levee and dike system around New Orleans. About 80% of New Orleans land area is underwater, or below sea level, I should say. It's essentially a bowl. You can think about it in those terms. So to be surrounded by open water and be exposed to increasingly stronger hurricanes, the land itself is sinking and the seas are rising. So that combination really makes it nearly impossible to be able to engineer a solution to keep New Orleans afloat.
FADEL: Now, it's important to note the study predicts the surrounding of New Orleans and even the possible submersion of New Orleans sometime in the future, and you don't know exactly when that will be. But is anyone actually making plans for this possibility in the future?
KEENAN: Well, I wouldn't say it's so much of a prediction as that the geological evidence and the paleoclimatic evidence points us in the direction that New Orleans will be surrounded by open water, and it is very likely that it will be inundated. That question, whether we have decades or maybe over a century to go, is, in a way, open to science. But the real question is, when and what does it mean to begin to plan a transition of the population, of businesses, of capital? And that's the challenge we have ahead of us in terms of public policy. There is not currently planning by the city or the state to begin this transition. What we have seen in recent years, which is critical as we highlighted in our work, is that there has been sediment diversion from the Mississippi River that can build land. And by building land in and around New Orleans, you can buy time, and buying time is the most critical aspect here.
Now, that project was killed by the governor just last year as not being particularly cost-effective as what was argued. The reality is much of the expense of that project was actually paid for by BP oil spill money from a number of years ago. So the reality is that every decade that we can buy to help transition is critical for the success of environmental management, environmental quality, what we leave behind, but also the humane treatment of people that are otherwise going to find themselves in a very difficult situation in the decades to come.
FADEL: I wonder - you know, you work for Tulane University. That's right in the heart of New Orleans. Just on a personal level, knowing what this study has found, what does that feel like?
KEENAN: Well, I think for many people in New Orleans, this is a little bit of an exhale. People privately talk about this, particularly people who lived in and around the Gulf Coast through successive hurricane seasons or Katrina. We understand the precarity of our lives and our livelihoods and the communities around us. And I think there's a full awareness about the fact that people talk about this in private but not in public. And so I think the more conversations that we can have in public, the better off we are to mobilize constituencies and mobilize our own democratic institutions to begin to plan for our future because we're so caught up in the idea of preserving what little we have in New Orleans. It's very difficult to think about the future and to plan for the future, and that's what we need to do.
FADEL: Jesse Keenan is the director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University. Thank you, Professor, for your time.
KEENAN: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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