One Town’s Amazing Plan to Lift Its Entire Downtown Above Sea-Level Rise
This is the New Jersey seaside town of Highlands, which has just provided me an excellent excuse to play with this fantastic global topography mapping tool:
As the map shows, the part of town north of Route 36 is flat and low, or, post-Sandy, what we’d think of now as very, very vulnerable. Obviously, this is where you’d want to put your downtown if the goal is launching boats. But the steeply shaded land elsewhere on the peninsula 50 miles from New York City looks like it would fare much better in a future of rising tides. Those parts of the town are protected by a natural ridge.