Word: flooded
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...urban village is being planned 120 miles north of London that will bring together mitigation and adaptation. "Bilston village will not only be a low-carbon-energy user, it will also try to make itself resilient to future climate changes," says West. For example, it will build flood protection into its design. "This could be a new model for how communities can walk on both legs into the climate future...
...Bangladeshis have lived with flooding forever. It's part of our culture and essential to our agricultural system," says Saleemul Huq, who directs the climate-change program for the International Institute for Environment and Development. "In the past, we experienced a very big flood about once every 20 years," Huq says. "But in the last 20 years, we've had four very big floods--in 1987, 1988, 1995 and 2005. So it appears that the new pattern is to get a 1-in-20-year flood every five or 10 years." That increase has gotten policymakers' attention. After years...
...suffering the brunt of climate change," he says, "but it is the rich countries' greenhouse-gas emissions that caused this problem in the first place." Britain is already subsidizing a substantial program in Bangladesh that will raise roads, wells and houses above the level of the last major flood. "Bangladesh is a showcase of what will happen under climate change," says Penny Davies, a diplomat at the British High Commission in Dhaka. "It amounts to a testing ground for what island states, including Britain, will need to do to protect ourselves in the years ahead...
...Heerden calls his three-layered plan "defense in depth": "For your inner layer of defense, you put hardened levees or flood walls in front of major population centers or other high-value assets. You protect that inner layer with a middle layer comprised of as large an expanse of wetlands or swamp as possible. Finally, you protect that middle layer with a third layer--barrier islands out in the ocean proper, which also act to absorb and weaken storm surges...
...Army Corps of Engineers and the government of Louisiana are each preparing plans for flood defense and coastal restoration. But after the Corps's disastrous performance during Katrina, many locals distrust it. The state worries that the Corps, despite reassurances from the director of its civil-works division, will shortchange wetlands protection in favor of its traditional preference for large levees. "We're not going to let them go down that road," says Robert Twilley, chief scientific adviser to the state's planners. "If we don't restore our wetlands, the levees won't last and neither will our economy...