Most of the time, we hear about how climate change is going to engender destruction, create refugees, and generally wreak havoc. But it's also going to create all sorts of little disparities in privilege, like, for instance, who gets to go to the beach.
In the new issue of Orion magazine, writer and climate activist Bill McKibben writes about the irony of holding last December's United Nations climate conference at Cancun, where beautiful beach-front hotels were built on a shaky compromise with the environment:
To make the white sand beaches more gringo-friendly, the beaches were stripped of coconut trees, and indeed of all native vegetation…[The hotels] are so heavy that they're literally pressing the peninsula into the sea, which is of course rising.
This setup has left the beach even more vulnerable to storms and erosion than it would be otherwise. And because Cancun's economy now depends on providing sand for tourists to stretch out on, anytime storms sweep away sand, the hotels need to find a new sand sources. The first solution, McKibben writes, was a quarry:
That $19 million hole in the ground provided sand enough to replenish the beaches, until Hurricane Dean arrived in 2007 and washed that sand away. This time, authorities contracted with a European firm, which sent a pair of boats offshore that sucked sand from the bottom and sprayed it onto the beachfront.
Stripping a beach of its vegetation accelerates the need for these measures, but beaches around the world are at risk from sea level rise and harsher storms. Sooner or later, anyone who has a beach now and wants to keep it, is going to have to start buying sand to shore it up.
Over the long term, the rising price of sand will mean that richer communities will be able to afford to create a simulacrum of the beach they once enjoyed, as The New York Times' Green blog reported this week:
If the cost of replacement sand increases as the supply decreases, richer communities will use up most of the sand. That will hold true whether or not the wealthier towns are more prone to erosion than those with lower property values.
It's not that beaches will disappear entirely, of course. But if you want to go to a nice one, you'll have to be prepared to pay.
