American Cities Are Drowning. They Need to Start Living With Nature to Stay Above Water.
As our world gets warmer, there's more water vapor in the air. That means more intense rainstorms in which tons of water will fall in very short periods of time, overwhelming our sewer systems and leading to flash floods. These are called "cloud bursts" or "extreme precipitation events," and they'll be a staple of urban life for the rest of our lives. So what's a city to do? There are engineering solutions, where we can try to build out our capacity to take on all this water with levees and tunnels below ground, or with rain gardens, bioswales, green roofs, and public works that double as emergency reservoirs above ground. We can also raise our streets.
But increasingly, urban planners believe we need to reimagine our relationship with nature—namely, we need to stop trying to tame nature and learn to live alongside it. All the asphalt and concrete covering our cities gives the water nowhere to go, when there used to be soil and vegetation there to accept the water. We need to think about tearing up some of what we've built on top of the land to reveal what's underneath, "daylighting" old streams and waterbeds and eventually buying out basement apartments in particularly flood-prone areas. We also need a system to warn people when these "cloud burst" events are incoming, not unlike a hurricane or a tornado.
To learn more, check out the video above, the latest in our Unapocalypse series on how smart people are working on clever ways to combat the climate crisis.
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