Miami Beach is developing infrastructure innovations to protect our city from the adverse effects of climate change.
The Miami skyline with construction cranes seen from Biscayne Bay.
“Miami ranks number one in terms of vulnerability to sea-level rise associated with climate change,” says Ben Kirtman, professor of atmospheric sciences at University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. The US National Climate Assessment, put together by government agencies such as NASA and the Department of Defense, predicts a two-foot sea-level rise by 2060 (other estimates predict six feet by the year 2100). A rise of only one foot could mean losing between 500 to 2,000 feet of land along Dade County shorelines; meanwhile, South Beach is only about 4,000 feet wide. To further complicate things, much of Miami Beach sits on porous limestone, allowing water to seep in, regardless of dikes and levees.
What will Miami look like in 50 years, 100 years? For a gentle preview, look back to the October “king tides,” which raise incoming water a mere foot above normal, submerging a swath of valuable real estate on South Beach and covering commuter routes during high tide. “We coined the term ‘sunny day flooding,’” says Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine of the king tides. “We’ve seen the sea-level rise, and we’ve seen corresponding flooding on peak high tides. It’s something we believe has not happened in the past.”
Is there time to solve the problem? “This strongly depends on what happens with greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades,” says Kirtman, “and on how much we are willing to invest in maintaining the built infrastructure.”
Mayor Levine’s administration has come up with a three-pronged program that he claims should address the issue for the next 30 to 50 years. First, engineers created custom one-way flex valves for all the city’s outfall pipes, allowing floodwater out but not back in (previous systems were clogged and broken). Next, the city identified flooding “hot spots,” mostly low-lying areas around West and Alton Avenues, and tested a high-power pump program that seems to have worked well this past fall using four to six pumps. The next step is installing 50 to 70 more pumps around the city. “It was a positive step in a long battle,” says Levine. “We know that with that existing technology, for the next 50 years, we can keep our streets dry. It depends, of course, on what [degree] of sea-level rise we believe is going to be the case, which is up for debate.”
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The third prong is the most ambitious, and involved changing building codes. “We’re going to be requiring all new construction to be built at a higher level. We’re going to be raising our sea walls in our code,” says Levine.
What about those who say Miami Beach will be a subsurface relic in a century? “I believe in the ingenuity of humankind,” he says, likening it to trying to envision FaceTime 50 years ago. “What you can’t imagine today will be invented to make our coastal cities resilient.”