Our government will have to choose what to save, what to engineer, and some parts will have to go.”ĭon’t miss the free Kids News Climate Change Education Kit here. “There isn’t enough money to protect every shoreline.
“But I don’t think that would happen with all areas,” she said. “They do not have the capacity* to react as natural systems do, so they’re very vulnerable,” she said.Īs for water lapping at the Opera House forecourt, Associate Prof Concejo said such a scenario was “absolutely possible … however this might not end up happening because Sydney would try to engineer an icon* such as the Opera House to protect it.” Picture: Climate Centralįellow geoscientist Associate Professor Ana Vila Concejo said it was hard to predict when sea level rises might become a pressing problem for Australia, but human-made structures on the water’s edge could be especially exposed. Australian experts responded to the images to caution that such an outcome would likely require centuries of inaction. Media_camera This digitally adjusted topographical map of Sydney shows Sydney Harbour after water rises at a 4C warmer level, with areas of water encroachment marked in red. The sea level rise Australia had experienced to date was chiefly affecting tidal flats and mangrove areas, he said, but the areas most vulnerable* to higher waters in future would be cities built on river deltas such as Cairns and Mackay, areas of reclaimed* land in Melbourne and Sydney and canal estates. “(The records) do go up and down, but the trend is always up,” he said. Some climate change critics claim tidal gauge records from Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour disprove sea levels have risen, but Professor Short said this idea was “fiction”. Professor Short co-authored a paper last year refuting* suggestions that half the world’s beaches would disappear as an effect of climate change, but he said sea levels were definitely rising, with evidence Australian tides were 25cm higher today than they were 100 years ago. “If we chose to do nothing, then in a few centuries it could become an island, but that’s a highly unlikely event”. “The Opera House will never become an island because we’ll respond to it before it gets to that stage, and to become an island it would be a few metres (of sea level rise) which would take centuries at the present rise,” he said. Honorary Professor Andrew Short from the School of Geosciences* at Sydney University said such images were “misleading*”. Media_camera The Sydney Opera House forecourt, seen here in July 2021, appears underwater in the Climate Central digitally altered, predictive images of the world-famous landmark in future centuries if rising sea levels go unchecked.
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