As seas rise, where will Louisiana’s fishers go?

A new paper generated a fair amount of consternation and eye-rolling when the authors claimed that New Orleans, the largest city in Louisiana, is at risk of being surrounded by open water by the end of the century. As human-caused global warming continues to drive sea-level rise, coastal Louisiana, the paper states, has likely “already crossed the point of no return.” Under the current warming trajectory, the projected loss of the remaining coastal wetlands in southern Louisiana puts over 1 million residents “in harm’s way,” according to the authors. Though that may sound shocking, it wasn’t the controversial part of the paper, which was published in Nature Sustainability this month — at least not to some outspoken critics. Instead, the authors were criticized for arguing that New Orleans should consider managed retreat, or relocating further inland to higher ground to avoid the worst climate impacts. “[P]lease stop saying ‘relocate New Orleans.’ That’s not going to happen,” wrote Christopher Ard, an 11th-generation New Orleanian, in an opinion column in The Lens, a local non-profit newsroom. Ard added, “If people want to move, they will,” and that researchers should instead use “words like ‘abandon’ or ‘give up on’ or maybe even ‘find somewhere new,’” to describe this out-migration. “Relocate just sounds silly,” he wrote. In their paper, the authors estimate coastal Louisiana could face 3 to 7 meters of sea-level rise and further predict that parts of the state’s shoreline will move inwards by 100 kilometers, closer to Baton Rouge. And while they acknowledge that the timeline for these processes is unclear, they insist that the region has a matter of decades to plan for migration away from these dangers, not centuries. The paper does not propose how and when those living in the Mississippi River Delta should move, but rather urges that preparing for projected sea-level rise “is a long process that cannot be put off.” Left out of the paper’s scope is what happens to