Making our Cities More Resilient Can't Wait by Richard Florida.

Millions upon millions of people live in coastal cities — not just New York and the Boston-Washington corridor, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, and New Orleans, but also many of the great cities in the emerging economies of Asia, India, and around the world. Their coastal locations are what fueled their growth in the first place, as a recent study titled "The United States as a Coastal Nation" [PDF] shows.

Cities, especially coastal ones, are critical components of the global economy. Just the world's 40 largest mega-regions — many of them located along coastline — account for roughly two-thirds of global economic output and nine in 10 of the world's innovations. The next several decades are primed to witness the greatest surge in urbanization in world history, and much of it will occur in coastal cities.

But coastal mega-cities are also susceptible to natural disasters, like Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina or the tsunami that led to the nuclear power plant meltdown in Japan. These great disasters appear to be occurring with increasing frequency, and prompt debates about their relation to global warming and climate change, as well as our cities' preparation for both storms and rising sea levels. . . .

When it comes to risk to population, the top 30 cities represent 80 percent of global exposure and just the top 10 represent roughly half of it. New York is among the major population centers exposed to coastal flooding, alongside Miami and New Orleans as well as Shanghai and Guangzhou, China; Mumbai and Kolkata, India; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Osaka-Kobe, Japan; and Alexandria, Egypt. The risk to population centers is roughly split between cities in the advanced and emerging economies. (emphasis mine)

Read the rest of the article at the link.

SRS