Tag Archives: flooding

Most of us will first experience climate change through water.

As we were closing this issue, I came across a video on Twitter of a highway just outside Vancouver, submerged in water. It wasn’t the only one. The densely populated urban heart of British Columbia was cut off from the rest of Canada by flooding and mudslides after an atmospheric river barreled through. The country’s […]

Yu Kongjian is the architect making friends with flooding

I got a chance to observe Yu in his natural habitat that evening. He escorted me and Geng into the club through a set of engraved metal doors and across the courtyard, where the traditional stone floor had been replaced with thick glass. Inside he ushered us downstairs to a massive table underneath that transparent […]

How rising groundwater caused by climate change could devastate coastal communities

“In the Bay Area there’s so much legacy contamination under the ground from military use, from the Silicon Valley tech booms—it left a lot of nasty stuff,” says Kris May, a coastal engineer and climate scientist who founded Pathways Climate Institute. “And what often happens is we put low-income houses in those areas after they’re […]

New global map shows populations are growing faster in flood-prone areas

And while the global population grew by 18.6% from 2000 to 2015, the population in these areas outpaced that growth, increasing by 34.1% over the same period. That means between 58 million and 86 million more people were exposed to flooding in those places over the course of 15 years. “It’s not particularly surprising that […]