The Nature Conservancy in Florida

In a Nature Conservancy study on sea level rise, areas of Big Pine Key will be under water in a matter of decades. The largest of the Florida Keys, Big Pine is best known as home to the Key deer.

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“We still have time to make changes. Nature – and people are part of nature – is very resilient. We can plan for change, and we can adapt if we want to and if we work hard enough.”

— Chris Bergh, Conservancy scientist located in the Florida Keys.

Can the Keys Adapt to Sea Level Rise?

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In the fall of 2005, Hurricane Wilma, believed to be the fourth most expensive storm in U.S. history, devastated Florida. Property damage across the state was estimated at more than $20 billion. In the Keys, much of the damage was caused when wind-driven water surged across many of the low-lying islands.

“Looking back now, the past few years have been very interesting for climate change awareness,” says Conservancy scientist Chris Bergh. “Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” came out in 2006. Then the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out in 2007. With those two events, the U.S. and the world were starting to think of climate change as a more mainstream issue, and more people were becoming more aware that there was a problem. And then, for residents of the Florida Keys, there was Wilma.”

There is some irony in the timing of Hurricane Wilma: she plowed ashore 70 years, almost to the month, after the infamous Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 killed more than 600 people in the Florida Keys. The Labor Day storm also finally and forever wiped out Henry Flagler’s obsessive masterpiece of a railroad from Miami to Key West. Though the sturdy bridges made of poured concrete and steel still stood, the trains and even the tracks on many of the islands had been unable to withstand the violence of the wind and water.

“With Wilma,” notes Bergh, “there was so much flooding from storm surge – so much property damage and impact on natural areas – that it was like a sudden preview of what sea level rise caused by climate change could do to the Keys. It got people thinking.”

It got Chris Bergh thinking about how the average height of land in the Keys is between three and four feet above sea level. That’s not much elevation to adapt to a rising sea, whether driven suddenly by a storm or driven more slowly, but more permanently by climate change.

To find out how much or how little margin there really might be, a team of researchers in the Keys, led by Chris Bergh, collected high-resolution elevation data of Big Pine Key and the best-available elevation data for the remainder of the Keys and combined that with the various projections of sea level rise prepared by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others.

The results were startling: Even under the most conservative scenario of a seven-inch rise in sea level over the next 100 years, many areas on Big Pine Key – a focal site for Conservancy activities in the Keys – are facing significant ocean incursions by 2100. Across the entire length of the Keys, the study found that seven inches of water could equate to dramatic changes in habitat for plants and animals and an estimated $11 billion in lost property value.

“It’s worth repeating that the projected sea level rise of seven inches is actually the most conservative scenario under the IPCC,” says Bergh.

He cites several studies, including the empirical evidence of the tide gauge at Key West, one of the longest continuous records of its kind in the U.S. Its collected data indicate that from 1913 to 2006, the sea rose nine inches. Considering how quickly the world’s glaciers and ice sheets are melting, it seems, notes Bergh, “far more likely that sea level rise in the Keys –and around the globe - will be significantly higher in this century than the last.”

Time to call the moving truck?

“Well, not quite,” says Bergh, who lives on Big Pine Key with his family. “This report is about hope, not fear. The point is to make people aware of the magnitude of the challenge and encourage them to action while we still have time to act to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation which would limit the amount of sea level rise and to develop and implement local plans to help nature and people resist and adapt to sea level rise.”

And that awareness has spurred action. Locally, the Monroe County Commission has assigned planning for mitigation and adaptation to climate change for the Keys to their existing Green Initiatives Task Force. Monroe County is also expected to join in a Climate Change Compact with Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties which are home to heavily populated urban areas sandwiched between the Everglades and the northern terminus of the Florida coral reef ecosystem.

Globally, the results of this report add to the weight of science as the Conservancy works with an increasing number of partners to address the root causes of climate change and help nature adapt.

“I’m optimistic,” says Bergh. “I’m putting an addition on my house so you can tell that I don’t think of this as impending doomsday for the Keys. We still have a chance to address climate change. We still have time to make changes. Nature – and people are part of nature – is very resilient. We can plan for change, and we can adapt if we want to and if we work hard enough.”