Climate Change a threat to America’s southern states

The city of Charleston, South Carolina recently announced that it will be funding a major project to raise the seawall along a portion of “The Low Battery,” by 2.5 feet. The Battery, a park and major tourist attraction, runs along the western side of the peninsula downtown Charleston sits on. The project is the latest in efforts to address the anticipated effects of climate change which are predicted to hit America’s southern states particularly hard.
The city’s design team has proposed several different design plans for the seawall. The one favored by the team itself would involve raising the entire walkway around the Battery — this allowing future teams to go in and further raise the seawall while not sacrificing a tourist’s view of Charleston harbor.
The plan, which has yet to begin construction, is already facing some backlash from workers in the downtown area. As a rapidly-growing city, Charleston is experiencing a major influx of commuters looking for parking space. Charleston’s revenue from parking is expected to pass $24.6 million this year. The Battery currently is ringed with parking spots around the whole park. The city design team’s preferred renovation strategy for the Battery would turn the streets adjacent to the park into more green space. In a city notorious for its precious, limited, and increasingly-unaffordable parking spaces, losing the battery would seriously hamper the many service-industry workers and university employees who work downtown. Many of my own friends work on the College of Charleston campus, located right in the heart of downtown. With the Battery out of the picture, they would have to park farther up on the peninsula and commute on foot, bus/Uber from their current residence, or pay daily parking fees for a spot in a parking garage.
But the concern over parking is just a small part of a much larger issue in Charleston, one echoed in many coastal cities throughout the southeast: how cities with crumbling infrastructure and skyrocketing development projects will deal with sea-level rise.
This year is forecasted to be another worse-than-average hurricane season in the United States, with fifteen named hurricanes being expected by NOAA in the Atlantic basin. A paper published in the journal Nature last year predicted that “the absence of protective measures could lead to US population movements of a magnitude similar to the twentieth century Great Migration of southern African-Americans”.
The Republican establishment’s position on climate change has shifted throughout the years, but it has remained consistently rooted in the belief that the idea of man-made climate change is unsubstantiated at best, and a Chinese hoax at worst. Republican governors in red states, such as Florida’s Rick Scott, have stood strong on these positions.
This has created an inverted and unbalanced relationship between southern states and the coastal communities within them, with the towns and cities most affected by climate change having to lead the way on climate change while facing ideological opposition from skeptical party members in state government. As Rick Scott denies that climate change is adversely impacting the people in his state, Miami Beach just finished an $11.9 million project to replenish and enhance its beaches, as part of a multi-community plan between communities in the Miami-Dade metropolitan area. The unintended issue of saltwater leaking into freshwater aquifers has meant expensive clean-up for coastal towns, the majority of which don’t have access to the same resources as Miami.
Even though conservatives might be unable to admit that sea levels are rising due to human activity, it’s become clear to many Southern leaders that the environment is becoming increasingly hostile to economic development. Old stereotypes of the Deep South have not adapted to contemporary America, where the region is now the fastest-growing in the United States. Miami, Tampa, Nashville, the Interstate-85 corridor from Atlanta to Charlotte, Savannah, and Charleston are all now attracting a diverse array of industries and investors. In particular, South Carolina has worked extremely hard to attract businesses to the state: offering tax breaks, investing in new infrastructure, and renovating its biggest cities into attractive, tourist-friendly cities. This work has paid dividends, considering that Boeing, Volvo, and Mercedes-Benz now all have manufacturing facilities in the greater Charleston metro area. Repeated environmental crises, such as Hurricane Joaquin in 2015 and Hurricane Matthew in 2016 which both turned Charleston into flooded, economic dead zones, could convince manufacturers to leave the state for greener, dryer pastures.
Edited by Ed McCombe.

