At present, one-quarter of the earth’s population lives less than sixty miles from the coastal ocean. Even with the best protection that engineering can provide—a dike system similar to that undertaken in the Netherlands, perhaps—sea-level rise will likely displace thousands of people during the next hundred years and make drinking the local water and farming the adjacent fields impossible for many thousands more. These effects will hit worst in areas where the land is low or sinking and where people are too poor to undertake construction measures.
