Louisiana Disappearing: Living On The Brink Of Climate Change

we're down by four points we're on our own three yard line we've got 30 seconds left and no timeouts what happens when nothing is done to stop climate change well the Gulf Coast of Louisiana is a pretty good example of it here every hour about a football field of land is lost to rising sea levels while the oil and gas industry has been an economic life-giver to this region it's also the reason that life here may soon be impossible welcome to Dulac a town in the indigenous Houma nation Territory it sits at 3 feet above sea level but with a gulf set to rise by more than 4 feet by the year 2100 all this will soon be underwater he used to be further this way but now it's all washed off you know I pray the pollens and everything else over there that was all ground here this entire area used to be marshland which helps slow down hurricanes but as gas companies began to dig more and more canals salty seawater started seeping in killing the wetlands to date coastal Louisiana has lost 1/4 of its land since the 1930s are you at all concerned that a Dulac will one day look like this oh yeah when I was younger this used to be our land the little canal would come through never just the ditch and now we can float a boat through it I might not be here maybe 20-30 years in here now the Gulf of Mexico is gonna be a new left I think this iris is this Cana just finished up um a viruses we're just growing the earth by digging up the oil and the coal it makes its making it more sick it's not just small towns that are in danger this coastline is home to half of the country's oil refineries 90% of offshore energy production and the nation's largest port and in the next 50 years most of what is not protected by levees will be gone so what's happened is you have a delta that has been totally destroyed and so it's sinking and it's sinking now at the same time the sea is rising so when I was in my 20s Big Cat Island in eastern Barataria Bay was a mile long and a half a mile wild in 1998 when I took this picture this was about 150 yards wide twitted yards long and this is what it looked like six years later certainly there are a lot of people here who work for the oil and gas industry but pretty soon all that infrastructure will be destroyed by hurricane storm surge and nothing is being done really significantly by the oil and gas industry to prevent this from happening but there is a plan to protect against land loss by restoring the wetlands it's called the coastal master plan but so far it only has a fraction of the more than 90 billion dollars it needs to work the plan would take this and turn it back into this so this area here shell Bank Bayou is one of the last examples of a Tupelo Cypress Swamp all of these trees are not reproducing so it's an example of what this land used to look like many years ago Katya and Eric are part of gulf south rising an initiative of climate justice activists who work with frontline communities here those most affected by climate change so here we're leaving shell bank by when going out onto Lake Maurepas which is a brackish water lake and this is an area where you can really see the saltwater intrusion you'll start to see a lot of the bald cypress trees that are under the salt water have been eaten away by the salt water Eric what about you how does it feel to be out here that sentence me and it makes makes you realize that like we are the last generation that will see this like my children would never get to see half of this eric introduced us to his cousin Sean they both live in Slidell a front-line community that completely flooded out during Hurricane Katrina and is also at risk of soon disappearing but you lived in this area for how long my whole life 27 years but this is my grandmother's house right over here how tall is that now eight feet they're going up eight feet and before just on the ground yeah before I was on the ground house raising costs tens of thousands of dollars which many residents have to pay out-of-pocket if they're not lucky enough to get a state grant I think we're looking at mass relocation especially of unique communities long-standing Creole communities Native American communities and we're looking at mass relocation for sure Colet and gulf south rising are fighting for climate justice and what often feels like a losing battle but for many communities at risk it's the only chance they've got we cannot sustain extracting oil and gas we just can't sustain it it's sinking the land in South Louisiana it's caught it's accelerating climate change we can't keep doing it I think the people who are being impacted have great ideas maybe it's just time for us to listen

Channel: AJ+

Views: 118,541

Rating: 4.5955801 out of 5

Keywords: climate change, Louisiana, environment, environmentalism, global warming, Gulf of Mexico, oil gas industry, levees, southeast, Dulac, shrimping, shrimper, The Lens, Slidell, Gulf South Rising, Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy, sea levels rising, Petroleum (Chemical Compound), AJ+, ajplus, Al Jazeera

Id: 4THdX9KOZ_4

Length: 5min 14sec (314 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2015