For smaller towns and villages the risk is more existential, says Bob Ward at the Grantham Research Institute of the London School of Economics.
“There are going to be some areas that simply become unviable because the cost of this is too difficult,” he says.
“It is most often with smaller communities where the cost of building a flood wall is huge compared to the economic activity which goes on there.”
Fairbourne, a Victorian seaside town in a picturesque setting on the Gwynedd coast, faces just such a threat.
Natural Resources Wales (NRW) will only support Fairbourne’s sea defences until the 2050s, given the prospect of rising sea levels and groundwater levels.
Ultimately residents face the prospect of having to move away – though currently with little information on when, or the compensation owed for their loss of property.
Fairbourne is effectively a test case for other locations facing threats from rising sea levels and inland floods.
Over the coming decades NRW plans to gradually cut the number of sites where it will “hold the line” against the tide, shifting scores to “managed realignment” and then “no active intervention” as costs become too high.
Britain’s big cities are not yet at risk but Ward points to Miami, Mumbai and Shanghai as low-lying coastal cities hideously exposed to hurricanes and typhoons.
“If you look at Miami, there is a city that is really struggling. Sea level rise already means it floods more regularly through high tides,” he says, adding that the heavy reliance on state-backed insurance will threaten the financial stability of the state of Florida in the event of a direct strike.
“There will come a point where people have to think ‘is it sensible to have a major city based in such a vulnerable place?'”
A future of expensive retrofitting, rebuilding and – eventually – mass migration is on the cards.
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