The Chicago Tribune published a recent article on the increasing move of American to coastal areas. The number of people moving to the Florida coastline alone has increased 1.1 million since 1990, not including part-year residents. A third of that coastal development has been on the shoreline itself, in spite of increasingly restrictive building codes put into place because of concerns about rising sea levels and sinking shores. Shoreline residents often push for beach replenishment efforts to maintain their properties, even though they come at tremendous economic costs which are often paid by people living nowhere near the coast.
At the same time, coastal flooding from high tides has increased in many areas. A recent story in Yahoo News discussed a recent study which shows that impacts from flooding at high tides will become more and more frequent, putting growing coastal populations at increased inconvenience and occasional risk, especially when combined with storm surges from tropical storms and hurricanes. The coastal flooding will not necessarily be catastrophic but will affect coastal infrastructure like bridges and roads, forcing communities to spend money to replace or move them.
