NEW ORLEANS – As reported by The Guardian, a recent perspective paper published in the Nature Sustainability journal assesses that New Orleans may well be underwater by the end of the century due to rising sea levels triggered by an ever-escalating, and catastrophic, climate crisis. The paper, whose authors include Jesse Kennan, an expert in climate adaptation at Tulane University, contends that this cataclysm is irreversible, requiring an eventual mass exodus of New Orleans to save residents from the inevitable, smothering tide.
“In paleo-climate terms, New Orleans is gone; the question is how long it has,” said Jesse Keenan, as reported by The Guardian. “There is an opportunity for palliative care; we can transition people and the economy. We can get ahead of this.”
The Guardian Study’s Warning
That the Louisiana wetlands are receding is old news, with nearly 2,000 square miles of land lost to coastal erosion since 1930, according to the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. Even estimates by Restore the Mississippi River Delta, a coalition of the Environmental Defense Fund, National Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, and Pontchartrain Conservancy, measure the rate of land loss at a football field-sized area every one hundred minutes.
The proposed Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project was meant to help build back sediment in fledgling coastal areas, yet was snuffed out in 2025 by Governor Jeff Landry, citing unsustainable spending and the threat of uprooting citizens in the project’s path. These politically divisive roadblocks, including the efforts of oil and gas companies to ignore the effects of their industry on the environment, contribute massively to what the paper, titled “Climate-driven depopulation and adaptation realities in America’s coastal ground zero”, claims will be the end of New Orleans as we know it.
“The combination of these decisions is driving a scenario where the state has stopped trying to build land,” Keenan told The Guardian. “That just accelerates the timeline. They could be buying time, but that option is foreclosed now, meaning it’s a certainty the New Orleans levees will fail multiple times again. The flood water will have nowhere else to go.”
Economic Stakes and Pushback
Critics of the study cite the global importance of Louisiana’s ports to the global economy as well as the lingering traumas of recent attempts to relocate whole communities away from coastal destruction, such as at Isle de Jean Charles.
“Coastal Louisiana moves over 90 percent of America’s grain exports and supplies more than 60 percent of its natural gas, fuel that is currently helping power Europe,” says Michael Hecht, President & CEO of Greater New Orleans, Inc. “This is not a community that can simply be written off. The economic stakes are national and global.”
A Relocation Case Study
The Isle de Jean Charles, a strip of land in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, that has lost 98% of its land to coastal erosion, is a recent example of the challenges that come with relocation. The island’s former residents, largely members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe, were forced to relocate when the US Army Corps of Engineers decided to exclude Isle de Jean Charles from a 2022 levee expansion and advised residents to move. A mass exodus commenced, with these “climate pioneers” forced to contend with an intergenerational trauma that tracks back to the displacement of ancestors from their homelands by colonizing interests.
Though not a forced resettlement by any governmental body, the necessity of fleeing climate destruction caused just as potent a loss for such a tightly knit community. If that could be the after-effects of such a small group of people, how would the people of New Orleans react to such a catastrophic potential reality?
Focus on Mitigation and Planning
Whether a similar level of destruction is bound for New Orleans or not, Hecht advises focusing on the implementation of policies and civic projects that can help allow coastal communities to thrive. Looking forward to the Lower Mississippi River Comprehensive Management Study and the Mississippi River Delta Transition Initiative to determine the best next steps, Hecht believes that while academics have been predicting New Orleans’ demise for decades, “the city is still here and worth fighting for”.
“GNO, Inc. is focused on the ‘left side’ of the disaster curve: implementing policies and practices that will allow coastal communities to thrive, here and around the world. We do not take relocation as inevitable,” says Hecht. “Louisiana has been taking coastal land loss seriously for decades, building a 50-year, $50 billion Coastal Master Plan informed by the best available science and already in active implementation. That is what a serious response to coastal vulnerability looks like.”
