Louisiana’s coast is disappearing, and its population has already started to retreat. The shoreline, the most exposed in the world, is projected to move more than 30 miles inland of New Orleans. By 2070, it will lose about 75% of its remaining wetlands. Eventually, all of coastal Louisiana will become uninhabitable, research has showed. The state has a narrowing window to plan for managed relocation that could be a model for other areas facing climate challenges, according to a new study coauthored by Yale’s Brianna Castro. 

“Louisiana is a canary in the coal mine. It is one of the rare places where we’re already clearly seeing climate-motivated depopulation combined with other social and economic factors,” said Castro, an assistant professor of urban sustainability at Yale School of the Environment.

For the study, published May 4 in the journal Nature Sustainability, Castro worked with an interdisciplinary team of scientists from Tulane University, Florida State University, and Coastal Carolina University. The team noted that the current population retreat in Louisiana offers a “first mover advantage,” which provides opportunities to learn what policies and plans are effective in advancing social welfare and environmental quality during relocation. 

A new study found that across nearly every U.S. region and every year through 2050, an amount of money spent deploying wind or solar delivers more combined climate and public health benefit than if it is spent on direct air capture, even under extremely optimistic assumptions of the development of direct air capture.

A Tulane-led team of interdisciplinary researchers says coastal Louisiana’s climate-driven land loss and population shifts could position the state to become a global leader in planning for climate adaptation. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, argue that Louisiana’s accelerating shoreline retreat and coastal depopulation offer an opportunity to develop strategies for households, infrastructure and regional economies to adapt to climate change.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have drawn up the first Europe-wide map of landscape quality and highlighted where wind energy and landscape protection overlap. Generally, the European costs of wind energy production would remain stable provided that no turbines were installed in areas that are particularly scenic. At the local level, conflicting objectives emerge: in the Alps, for example, the cost for wind generation would significantly increase due to the overlap between windy and scenic locations. 

Long‐term monitoring of several Finnish lake areas demonstrates that autumn conditions indirectly govern winter thermal regimes.

Destructive landslides are more likely to occur after wildfires, but how does the hazard change as vegetation regrows? Scientists are improving prediction methods to reduce costly unnecessary warnings.