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Urban resiliency in response to projected sea level rise

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Sea levels are rising faster than they have in at least 28 centuries, according to recent research, and by 2100, they are expected to rise by one to four feet - possibly even higher. If emissions go unchecked and polar ice sheets melt on a large scale, global sea levels could climb by dozens of feet in the coming centuries. From Shanghai and Mumbai to New York and Buenos Aires, even a few feet of sea level rise threatens to flood homes and highways, inundate sewage treatment plants, and contaminate drinking water.

Landscape architect Kristina Hill argues that cities need to start planning now for impacts that will happen 50 or 100 years in the future. "It takes decades for us to get our act together and build things," says Hill, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "Future generations won't have the luxury of decades. They're going to be coping with two feet of sea level rise over 25 years, potentially."

Hill advocates blending natural ecosystems and human-made infrastructure to help cities adjust to rising tides. She has studied sea level rise adaptation in Germany and The Netherlands and worked with city governments in New Orleans and Seattle to design water management systems. Currently, she is developing innovative adaptation strategies for the Bay Area. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Hill talked about her vision for modifying coastal communities, the limits to adaptation, and the promise of "cyborg landscapes."

Yale Environment 360: From your perspective as a landscape architect, which projections of sea level rise should we be paying attention to as we plan for our cities, and how far out should we be looking?

Kristina Hill: From a very practical perspective, we have to at least look in terms of the horizon in which we borrow money to pay for infrastructure investments. So if we build a new sewage treatment plant, we know it's going to take a hundred years to pay it off. We at least have to make sure that we're planning for what's going to happen during that debt period. That's the minimal responsible behavior. But I have always thought that we have to plan for the upper trend line, because even if that isn't what happens by 2100, it is eventually going to happen. And we owe a big debt to future generations because we have benefited from the use of fossil fuels.

We have doubled down in times of change and remade our original bets on things like sewage treatment facilities and roadways.

e360: You've said that in most cases the best response to sea level rise is not the extreme one of building walls or abandoning the coast, but instead it's something you call "hybrid edges." What do you mean by that term, and what it would look like in New York or in San Francisco, for example?

Hill: I should qualify it a little bit because in San Francisco it would look a little different than in New York because of storm surge, the higher wave regime potential of hurricanes [on the U.S. East Coast]. And I do think that giving up some houses that are expensive and highly exposed makes a lot of sense. But overall, in most urban areas, we have tended to double down in times of change and remake our original bets on things like sewage treatment facilities and roadways. We don't abandon many roadways. And I think that we will continue to do that because frankly it is so difficult politically and economically to relocate major infrastructure in the U.S.

When I think about the hybrid edge idea in San Francisco, it would look like a mix of wetlands and beaches, and what I've been calling micro-polders, where you have a levy or a berm around areas that contain housing. It's like being in a shallow lake. Houses are on piles, they're not floating, and the pond actually can take an extra three or four feet of storm water when needed. In the infrastructure itself, people are living in beautiful houses on piled foundations, and they're surrounded by wetlands and beaches. To me that doesn't sound like a hair shirt. All of the urbanizing edge of San Francisco Bay could be redeveloped in this way.

e360: What is meant by the term "cyborg landscapes," and what is exciting about the concept?

Hill: There was a literary movement in the 80s to think about the cyborg as anything that involves artificial parts combined with biological systems. And I think it's still a really important idea today because we're looking at living systems as a real component of functioning infrastructure. When we use rain gardens or wetlands as part of our storm drainage system, we're essentially creating a cyborg landscape. One of my colleagues at the University of Virginia, Elizabeth Meyer, first used that term about landscape in talking about Olmsted's design for the Back Bay Fens of Boston. He designed that in an artificial way to re-grade that entire muddy river landscape so people wouldn't be exposed to sewage that was stranded on the banks of parks at high tide. This technologically is actually cheaper than putting in a lot of concrete reinforcements, steel, and machinery. We can extend our grey infrastructure by adding a lot of green infrastructure.

e360: Does it work as well, specifically in the case of sea level rise?

Hill: We know that we can reduce costs. Here in the Bay Area we've done some studies looking at what happens to the cost of a levy if you add a wetland on the ocean side. They're calling them horizontal levies - a levy with a wedge of wetland on the bay side. That wedge-shaped topography, more than the plants themselves, trips the waves further out, reduces the wave height. And then the levy can be smaller, so it actually saves a lot of money per mile to add this wetland wedge on the outside.

e360: You mentioned that since San Francisco doesn't have to deal with big hurricanes and storms, it could take a different design approach. What ideas would work in places like New York that do have to deal with much higher storm surges?

Hill: We're expecting to see kind of a doming of sea level, a greater amount of rise in the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast than we'll see on the West Coast. It could be an extra twelve inches. So it's possible that on the East Coast we'd have to use more wetlands and more sand dunes and beaches, and less of the hybrid wet pond development. But I think there are still places where a combination of houses on piles and wetlands could work. That wouldn't be a bad strategy for Atlantic City or Virginia Beach to look at for about a hundred-year period. They will still have to evacuate for hurricanes. And they might have to design those houses so that they can accept damage and be rebuilt so long as the pilings are designed to last a hundred years.

The other option for places like Rockaway Beach [in New York City] is to build a kind of a rock peninsula that would serve as a spine to allow houses to be built on it, and roadways. Because the problem really is that roadways on sandy spits are eventually going to go away. And then you have to get to your house by boat, and that only works for a certain number of people. So the roadways themselves are going to end up being a limiting factor on how long we can occupy and rebuild. I think we'll have to eventually abandon the Rockaways, parts of Queens, parts of Staten Island. Abandon is the wrong word. We really have to reinvest in them as ecosystems that are resilient to storms, instead of seeing them as just sad, abandoned spaces.

e360: So some of the ideas you're talking about are intended to buy us time so that we can slowly withdraw from these areas?

You have to imagine what's happening to public infrastructure while people rebuild and rebuild and rebuild these homes.

Hill: Well, buy us time so that people who want to be creative and stay can be creative and stay. But if sea level gets to ten feet, we really need to rethink. It will be like medieval castle walls. Maybe Manhattan would be protected, but other places would really have to retreat to higher ground. If sea level rise even gets to four feet, we will have so many infrastructure investments we have to make, sewage treatment plants, sewage pipes, which will fill with groundwater, contaminated soil that will be remobilized by rising water tables. Otherwise we're going to have to abandon large areas of roadways and other infrastructure. And then it will be like living off the grid in some house in the Rockaways with no road and no sewer. You have to put it in context and imagine what's happening to the public-sector infrastructure while people are trying to rebuild and rebuild and rebuild these homes.

e360: Do the ideas you're talking about also apply to countries where there might be even more limited financial resources?

Hill: Well the nice thing about green-technology - building wetlands and living on pile houses in wet ponds - is a lot of these ideas would work in developing countries. It's just moving earth, whether that's done in part by hand labor, with shovels, or by big machines. And eventually, like I said, if it gets to six feet or ten feet, people have to pull back a lot further.

e360: Beyond sea-level rise, what are some of the ways that cities can work with nature, rather than against it, to prepare for climate change?

Hill: We need to bring plants into cities that allow us to have higher evapotranspiration rates, like when your body sweats to release heat. Evapotranspiration releases heat from the city in important ways, and it provides shade at the same time. There's a lot of work to do to adapt cities in the middle of the United States - Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis - to temperatures they aren't used to feeling.

e360: You've said that cities are at the edge of climate change.

Hill: Cities are heat islands. They are showing us what the future is going to be like for other places. Plants can survive in cities that can't survive in the rural areas around those cities because cities are warmer. So in a way they're islands of a future climate. But that means they'll also be peaks in that future climate where things get too hot.

e360: Getting back to sea level rise, can you name a couple of U.S. cities that you think are doing a good job so far of starting to adapt their waterfronts to climate change?

Hill: I think New York's efforts on urban infrastructure are very important. When a city that big starts focusing on something, even if they just do a little, it makes a big impression. For example, the [U.S.] Army Corps [of Engineers] has changed its policies in part as a result of pressure from people in New York City demanding that there be other options besides big sheet piling metal walls. So when New York does something, the whole government feels it, and then starts to change.

Portland, Maine is being very practical about their approach. As a small city, they've been doing a good job. The whole Puget Sound region has a terrific program with [the] U.S. Fish and Wildlife [Service] where they are looking at highway realignments and all kinds of major infrastructure changes around Puget Sound.

e360: It sounds like you feel fairly hopeful.

Hill: We will see patchy adaptation and we will see people in certain regions pull off some successes. And we'll see other regions stick their heads in the sand. And maybe their challenge is bigger. I don't know what the solution is for Miami. I don't know what the solution is for Honolulu. So there are areas of bigger challenges.

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Rethinking Urban Landscapes To Adapt to Rising Sea Levels

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Sea levels are rising faster than they have in at least 28 centuries, according to recent research, and by 2100, they are expected to rise by one to four feet - possibly even higher. If emissions go unchecked and polar ice sheets melt on a large scale, global sea levels could climb by dozens of feet in the coming centuries.

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MIAMI-On the job just six months as the chief resilience officer in Florida's largest county, Jim Murley has gotten pretty good at his climate change 101 speech. It's out of necessity.

As the Earth's temperature rises, the oceans warm, he told a crowd at a Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce event this spring. When water gets warmer, it expands, and the seas rise. And if glacial melt accelerates as predicted in Greenland and Antarctica, Florida is in even more trouble, he warned.

"We're on a peninsula surrounded by water," Murley said. "That defines the very issue that we have to deal with as we think about sea-level rise and climate change."

Murley wasn't telling anyone in the audience anything they hadn't heard before. But as South Florida has begun to experience the tangible effects of climate change, he was saying it from a place of authority that might have given people some of the reassurance they've been craving. No one person can stop the rise of the seas, but Murley's appointment meant that for the first time, someone was in charge of the county's response to its greatest existential threat.

"People wanted that, and they needed that," said Daniella Levine Cava, a county commissioner who, along with environmental activists, pressed the Republican Miami-Dade County mayor for a more comprehensive approach to resilience. "People were looking for a leader on these issues."

More communities are seeking not just reassurance but leadership in the face of climate change. Often it's coming in the form of a chief resilience officer, an emerging job title in cities, counties and even in states and at universities and businesses. Cities as large as Boston, San Francisco, Chicago and New York have chief resilience officers, as do smaller cities and towns like Berkeley, Calif., and Minot, N.D. In U.S. cities, the chief resilience officers, or CROs, often report directly to the city manager or mayor, depending on the form of government, and have broad authority to work across departments.

The job goes far beyond figuring out how governments or institutions should reduce greenhouse gas emissions or how to adapt to climate change-although climate change is the fundamental crisis fueling the need for the role in many cities. Chief resilience officers are being asked to help transform communities that face threats from sea-level rise or other stressors. They're trying to find ways to create better-educated communities, to address chronic poverty and decades of inequity, to identify shoddy housing conditions, and to diversify their economic base, so that when the inevitable climate-related changes occur, people don't get left behind.

Most chief resilience officers are funded by the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities program, which coined the term several years ago and started paying for the salaries of such positions in cities worldwide, as well as for the creation of resilience strategies. Cities compete to join the program, which is set on May 25 to announce its third and final round of cities.

Mayors desperately want their cities to be part of the program; 330 cities applied last year for 35 slots. The foundation pays for the chief resilience officer the first two years, and cities must commit to certain guidelines, including participating in a close-knit network of peers all working on many of the same challenges.

The program is in its early stages, so it remains to be seen whether cities will stick with it once the grant funding runs out. But the idea has so influenced the culture of local government that a number of cities and institutions have begun adding the title of CRO, too, even if they aren't part of the 100 Resilient Cities program.

Both Miami-Dade County and Miami Beach, climate change hot spots, have CROs but aren't yet a part of the grant program. They've applied together for a slot in the program, along with the city of Miami. In their communities, sea-level rise is a persistent part of the conversation.

"I wake up every morning and I think about this. And I talk about it," said Susanne Torriente, the chief resiliency officer and an assistant city manager in Miami Beach.

Protecting people, not just infrastructure

Before she moved to Miami Beach, Torriente worked in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., another coastal city on the front lines of climate change. There, one of her main goals was to create a climate-savvy workforce. She pushed to have all employees, including police officers and firefighters, undergo climate change training.

She sees her job as one that's successful because she has broad authority.

"A CRO can't be someone buried in the organization," she said. "I can be successful here because I'm an assistant city manager. I was successful in Fort Lauderdale because I was an assistant city manager and had all of operations talking to me."

The Rockefeller Foundation began cultivating the concept of urban resilience more than a decade ago, as it worked to help cities in Asia develop resilience to climate change, said Andrew Salkin, the chief operating officer of 100 Resilient Cities. The foundation focuses on urban areas, Salkin said, because by 2050, experts project that 70 percent of the world's population will reside in a city. An estimated 65 percent of the housing where those people will live has yet to be built, he said, which means cities will have to figure out where to put all those people, they'll have to think about how those people will be educated and they'll have to consider how to develop a workforce. All those decisions will come even as many cities also adapt to a changing climate and rising sea levels.

The Rockefeller program aims to create conditions within cities so that people, institutions, businesses and other systems have the capacity to survive, adapt and grow regardless of the challenges they face-either from disasters and emergencies, or from chronic problems like high unemployment and inadequate public transportation or endemic violence. The foundation would like to see the concept spread beyond the original cities, so places other than the original 100 adopt a similar approach to resilience.

"We're eager for people to pick up a holistic view," Salkin said. "Resilience is about everything, but it's also about a focus. How do you take what you're already doing and how do you leverage it?"

That means, for example, thinking beyond just building levees to protect the city from another Hurricane Katrina, said Jeff Hebert, the chief resilience officer in New Orleans, one of the first U.S. cities with such a post. It can also mean coming to terms with how race, education level, gender, age and disability can contribute to what's known as social vulnerability.

"For us, our view toward this is not just looking toward the environmental issues as relates to something like Hurricane Katrina, but also the social issues that are part and parcel," Hebert said. "Those issues are just as important to think through and to try to find solutions to as are the sea-level rise. We have to focus not just on infrastructure and natural systems and mitigation of climate, but also address the people side of the coin."

'Sandy really changed the conversation'

Like New Orleans with Katrina, many of the places with chief resilience officers have faced a crisis that tested their very identity or existence. Superstorm Sandy in New York City, for example, or the 2011 floods in Minot, N.D.

Others, like Norfolk, Va., are figuring out how to adapt to rising sea levels that threaten not just their physical existence but the naval industry that has supported the community and the nation's security for decades. All are preparing for the inevitable crisis or challenge to come, whether it's a weather-related disaster, an economic downturn, an earthquake or flood, racial strife, a mass shooting or civil unrest or even rampant growth.

But for many places, climate change is the underlying challenge.

"A lot of our story with resilience started before Sandy, but Sandy really changed the conversation around the recognition that we face risks now, that climate change isn't something that's going to happen 100 years from now or somewhere else," said Daniel Zarrilli, the director of the New York City Mayor's Office of Recovery and Resiliency and the city's chief resilience officer. "We have vulnerabilities now. They're only growing."

In New York City, the vulnerabilities include a growing population, growing inequality within that population and the challenge of aging infrastructure.

"A lot of the work of my office is focused on climate, but it exists in a wider context," Zarrilli said. "As we're thinking about the investments we make around climate change, we need to think about how those investments are fitting into our communities, how they impact people and how they could help or hurt the other types of programs we want to continue to pursue. Whether it's expanded transit access in certain neighborhoods, or whether it's green infrastructure for improved water quality."

Mayors and city employees, the foundation discovered, often get caught up in the day-to-day of running the city and may need help identifying strategies that keep them from lurching from crisis to crisis. Hurricane Katrina highlighted that urgency in U.S. cities, Hebert said. So did Superstorm Sandy.

"That decade of work in New Orleans, and work in New York post-Sandy, really had an impact in looking at what going on in cities," he said.

Linking climate to social inequities

Many chief resilience officers have urban planning, transportation or emergency management backgrounds. Some come to the role with years of municipal management experience behind them, and a nuanced understanding of how crucial it is to have someone who can work across departments.

In Boston, for example, racism is considered a chronic stress and social challenge. There, Mayor Martin Walsh has directed the chief resilience officer, Atyia Martin, to focus her efforts on racial cohesion. It might be uncomfortable for people to talk about, said Martin, who has a health care background, but it's "at the core of many of the inequities that we see, both in terms of what's happening in day-to-day life and what happens after disasters and emergencies."

"What happened in Ferguson, what happened in Baltimore. All of these things are kind of the culmination of all these other social challenges in communities bubbling up to the point where you need to have these big responses," she said.

In New Orleans, they're working with the concept of "adapt to thrive," Hebert said. The city can build big walls to manage water to the best of its technological abilities and economic limits, Hebert said. But if people inside don't have access to economic opportunity, safe and affordable housing, and an equitable education, sea walls are useless.

"If people inside are poor, it doesn't matter," he said.

For New York City, it's about "thinking holistically about how we tie our actions on climate together with our actions to address inequality here ... to really get at the heart of some of these issues that are threat multipliers toward each other," Zarrilli said. "Climate exacerbates the threat of inequality, and in come cases, vice versa. We want to make sure we're addressing them in a holistic way."

More than a figurehead?

Officials in Minot were encouraged to add a chief resilience officer to boost the city's prospects for a U.S. Housing and Urban Development grant to build resilience into its long-term flood recovery. The town of 46,000 landed the $74 million federal grant this year, after adding the CRO post.

Donna Bye, a landscape architect by training and the city's planner, leads a department of one, with two AmeriCorps volunteers. It took the city several years to understand how a focus on resilience could benefit it in the long term, Bye said, because it had been so inundated with the day-to-day management of its emergency and its aftermath. Minot had been "a city in crisis," Bye said.

"A chief resilience officer was nowhere on our radar," she said.

But as the city started to apply for recovery grants, it began to understand how the Souris River, which it had begun to see as an enemy, could also be a part of its recovery. People wanted more open space in the city; Minot could meet the community demand, officials realized, and have more floodplains it needs to protect the city.

"We started realizing during the process that we wanted to fully commit to the idea of change," she said. "The city manager came to me and said: 'We have to do this job. Do you want to lead us into the next five to 10 years of the grants?'"

That's exactly what 100 Resilient Cities hoped would happen around the world, Salkin said, even if cities aren't part of the program. But cities with CROs need to make sure it's not just a figurehead title, he said. The resilience officer needs to be someone who works closely with the mayor across bureaucratic barriers, to "challenge people about the norms," he said.

"Everyone has an understanding of place," Salkin said. "The conversation about resilience has been deeper and more open than we could have imagined. The cities are starting to get real value from the effort."
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500

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Coastal Cities Look to Resilience Chiefs to Combat Climate Change

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MIAMI-On the job just six months as the chief resilience officer in Florida's largest county, Jim Murley has gotten pretty good at his climate change 101 speech. It's out of necessity. As the Earth's temperature rises, the oceans warm, he told a crowd at a Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce event this spring.

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Just as rising seas pose serious threats to coastal residents and human-built systems and structures, and cause human climate refugees to flee low-lying atolls, these seas are also threatening many diverse species of wildlife.

Coastal species are particularly affected, and some are losing habitat as rising water covers the beaches they rely on for important life functions, like nesting. Another chief concern is the intrusion of salty sea water into freshwater habitats and the impacts that has on some species.

A recent University of California-Davis study predicts up to 90 percent of coastal freshwater turtle species will be at risk from sea-level rise. The study was published in Biological Reviews in March. If sea levels rise three feet by 2100 - a frequently cited estimate well within the range of NASA's projections - salty seawater is likely to inundate many of the freshwater habitats these turtles need.

Some turtles 'just continue to lose body fat'

Mickey Agha, a doctoral candidate in ecology at UC-Davis, was the lead author on the study. Using georeferencing, his research team compared maps of projected sea-level rise with range maps showing where coastal freshwater turtles live to see where the two overlap. According to the study, turtles in Oceania and southeastern North America are facing the most serious threats. Many live in freshwater adjacent to brackish ponds where, during periods of high water, the brackish pools can move into the freshwater and raise the salinity. Drought and water diversion can also increase salinity levels. While many turtles can live in brackish areas, many don't do well with high levels of salinity.

"Their bodies can't process waters with high-salts compositions," Agha explains. "So, what they do is they refrain from eating or drinking when in these salty waters, and by doing so they essentially just continue to lose body mass over time." However, Agha notes some species have adapted to survive in more saline water. He points to the diamondback terrapin, which lives on the East Coast, as being able to live in brackish water by excreting salt from glands near its eyes. Other turtles may exhibit similar adaptations, Agha says, but the topic has not been thoroughly studied.

With suitable habitat available nearby, animals may be able to move short distances to escape high-salinity waters. Northern California's Suisun Marsh, for instance, is home to a population of western pond turtles, and Agha studies these turtles and how they adapt to the somewhat brackish water in the marsh.

"I believe that they're behaviorally adjusting to changes in water salinity," he says. "So when the water salinity is too high, they just move. The issue for them is: if there isn't any space to move to or freshwater sources to move to, they will just lose the habitat completely. We could start seeing population declines in the areas where they are unable to access freshwater."

Habitat loss confounds turtles' easily moving to safety

Importantly, loss or destruction of habitat can make moving difficult or impossible, and in many coastal areas, flooding, hurricanes, and extreme weather can also drastically change water composition and nearby habitat. Invasive species raise additional concerns, and Agha cites the red-eared slider as a threat to native California turtles, which he says they're out-competing for resources.

To learn more about how turtles respond to salinity, Agha and fellow researchers have fitted GPS transmitters on some of the Suisun Marsh turtles to track their movements in response to changing salinity, tidal fluctuations, and other factors. They are also conducting lab work to analyze the turtles' blood chemistry and learn more.

Whether or not the turtles ultimately adapt successfully to saltwater inundation and sea-level rise is a bit of a mystery. Agha notes some species of the long-lived reptiles can take up to 20 years to produce a new generation, so it might be a while before the evidence is clearer. "The question is 'Can they adapt fast enough to these changing aquatic environments?'" he says.

Look next to Hawaii for another example of a species confronting risks posed by rising sea level.

Northwest of the beach resorts of the main Hawaiian Islands lie a string of small, mostly low-lying islands and atolls home to many species, including endangered Hawaiian monk seals. These islands, and the creatures that inhabit them, are in danger from sea-level rise.

Rare, endangered Hawaiian monk seal faces challenges

The Hawaiian monk seal is endangered and very rare, with only around 1,400 in the world. Most live in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, where females give birth on sandy beaches, nesting and nursing their pups. And it's not just seals in need of these low-lying habitats. According to NOAA marine biologist Jason Baker, over 94 percent of Hawaiian green sea turtles use one location - French Frigate Shoals - for nesting.

Earlier models had predicted lower levels of sea-level rise, but many scientists now predict around one meter of sea level rise by 2100. That could leave huge swaths of these low-lying islands under the ocean with even a conservative sea-level rise scenario. "Under almost any of the sea-level rise scenarios, there's going to be some habitat loss," Baker says. "We don't know how much. So I would anticipate that there's going to be population declines because of that."

In addition to pupping, the seals also use the islands to molt their fur and skin annually for a few weeks, according to Baker. They may be able to find higher elevation islands to use for all these purposes, but with habitat loss, animals will likely be forced into closer quarters. Baker says the seals have high "site fidelity" and often go back to the islands where they were born, but they also are able to move around the islands. He says it is possible they may swim to other islands in search of new habitat.

However, he says one behavior won't change. "They're not going to start having their pups in the water and nursing them in the water," Baker says. "There's no pinniped that does that."

In the eastern U.S., engineers are in a mad rush to ward off the rising seas. Miami Beach has spent $500 million on pumping systems and other methods to help make the city more resilient to rising sea levels, as researchers investigate other innovative engineering solutions.

Low-lying habitat for Florida Key deer in danger

But further south in the Florida Keys, many species of wildlife also are threatened by rising sea levels. The endangered Key deer is a subspecies of small deer - with males weighing no more than 75 to 85 pounds - that inhabits many islands in the lower Keys.

A 2017 article in Conservation Genetics estimates the deer's population to be roughly 1,000. However, their low-lying habitat is in grave danger.

Are natural selection and evolution best hope for Florida key deer? A 'grim' outlook?

According to Eric Hoffman, associate professor of biology at the University of Central Florida and co-author of the 2017 study, the primary concern is the "freshwater lens" which allows freshwater to pool on the island. He says that if the sea level rises even minimally, this lens could be breached, causing saltwater inundation, and making the water on the islands unpotable. Without any freshwater, many species are likely to perish.

"The concern is that if the sea level rises just a little bit," Hoffman says, "basically that [lens] will wash out. And basically, the larger Keys like Big Pine Key, and certainly all the smaller Keys, will no longer be able to hold freshwater pools because they will just be washed in with the saltwater."

Hoffman says he believes evolution and natural selection may offer the best hope for survival, though he admits the outlook is grim.

"Evolution is a process for which a selection, natural section, will act on the genetic diversity that's present within the population," he says. "If there are genetic variants that are present in the population that allow individuals to be able to survive better under certain conditions, then those individuals will be able to leave more offspring and, assuming those traits are genetic in nature, then they'll pass on these traits to their offspring."

But Hoffman is quick to point out it's not just deer in danger - the islands are facing an ecosystem-wide threat. He says other species at risk are the Lower Keys marsh rabbit, snakes, butterflies, and many others. He's quick to note each of these species is only one part of a larger system.

"It's not the species so much as the ecosystem that's being altered and lost and there's a lot of other species that are directly impacted and the ecosystem as a whole," Hoffman says. "It's a symbol of the ecosystem as a whole that's being changed."

AUTHOR
Kristen Pope is a Wyoming-based freelance writer who frequently covers science and conservation-related topics.

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Rising sea levels putting wildlife at risk " Yale Climate Connections

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Just as rising seas pose serious threats to coastal residents and human-built systems and structures, and cause human climate refugees to flee low-lying atolls, these seas are also threatening many diverse species of wildlife. Coastal species are particularly affected, and some are losing habitat as rising water covers the beaches they rely on for important life functions, like nesting.