As ocean levels swell, an English coast crumbles

From the International Herald Tribune:

BECCLES, England: This winter a 50-foot-wide strip of Roger Middleditch's sugar beet field fell into the North Sea, his rich East Anglian lands reduced by a large fraction of their acreage. The adjacent potato field, once 23 acres, is now less than 3 - too small to plant at all, he said.

Each spring Middleditch, a tenant farmer on the vast Benacre Estate here, meets with its managers to recalculate his rent, depending on how much land has been eaten up by encroaching water. As he stood in a muddy field by the roaring sea one recent morning, he tried to estimate how close he dares to plant this season.

"We've lost so much these last few years," he said. "You plant, and by harvest it's fallen into the water."

Coastal erosion has been a fact of life here for a century, because the land under East Anglia is slowly sinking. But the erosion has never been as quick and cataclysmic as it has been in recent years - an effect of climate change and global warming, according to many scientists. To make matters worse for coastal farmers, the British government has stopped maintaining large parts of the network of seawalls that once protected the area.

Under a new policy that scientists have labelled "managed retreat," governments around the globe are concluding that it is not worth taxpayer money to fight every inevitable effect of climate change.

Land loss at Benacre "has accelerated dramatically," said Mark Venmore-Roland, the estate's manager. "At first it was like a chap losing his hair - bit by bit, so you'd get used to it. But last few years it's been really frightening."

With higher seas level and more vicious storms created by warming, he and Middleditch say, the coastal fields are rapidly disappearing, as the low cliffs on which the fields sit slip into the water in huge chunks.

A report this year from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that rising seas will force 60 million people away from their coastal homes and jobs by the year 2080.

Another study, the Stern Report, released last December by the British government, projected hundreds of millions of "environmental refugees" by 2050. That category includes both people whose land is flooded off and those whose pastures are parched by drought...

"Farmers are on the front lines of climate change. They're out there. It's affecting their business," said Tanya Olmeda-Hodge of the Country Landowners Association...