The travel-guidebook sands of Copacabana and Ipanema in Rio de Janeiro, St-Tropez in France, Fiji’s Qalito Island, and Thailand’s Phuket are imperiled by climate change, as are the iconic waterfront metropolises of Hong Kong and Singapore. The ocean doesn’t distinguish between moneyed beaches and harder-scrabble coasts, but glamorous waterfronts have greater visibility. In Louisiana a master plan of 124 projects has been designed to leave 800 square miles of land intact for 50 years, at a cost of about $50 billion. The town of Palm Beach in Florida pays for the pumps along its waterfront streets to keep multimillion-dollar homes dry, preserving real-estate prices that generate rich municipal taxes.
When government spending is not pumping sand onto imperiled beaches, it’s sucking water out or reconstructing coasts. Engineers in 2019 began an $18 million project in Surfside, Fla.-on the beach where a condominium collapse this year killed 98 people-and may eventually undertake a similar effort on Surfside Beach in the city of Seal Beach, Calif. Over the past century, New York has received 120 million cubic yards of sand, or 8% of the national total, for replenishment, ranking fifth behind California, Florida, New Jersey, and North Carolina. But it’s far from the only coastline where federal money is being spent on beach welfare.
The population of Long Island-legally it’s considered a peninsula, jutting eastward into the Atlantic from New York City-is wealthier and better resourced than people in most places in the U.S. That makes the Hamptons both a climate laboratory and the face of an existential question: How long can, and should, governments deploy a mountain of cash against the implacable rise of warming seas? Of all places, it’s the Hamptons and nearby beaches that will be the biggest test bed for the elaborate policies and defensive measures needed in vulnerable beach communities around the world, even those that aren’t home to millionaires and billionaires. The spending is merely the latest turn in an eight-decade drama between humans and nature-storm destruction and restoration, lobbying and lawsuits-that’s creating one of the most ambitious running battles against climate change in U.S. What’s happening on beaches in the Hamptons and nearby is no last-minute maneuver. After years of delays, the project was authorized to begin construction thanks to last year’s Cares Act, which was meant to stimulate the economy in the early depths of the Covid-19 pandemic. Some wealthy homeowners on the beach will join in the effort to thwart rising seas, paying small fortunes to install private sea walls. As the program gets going, state and local governments will foot a portion of the bill for ongoing costs.
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