The Resilience of New Orleans: Urban and Coastal Adaptation to Disasters and Climate Change

New Orleans is like many historic port cities around the world - a place sited on vulnerable grounds that exploited the interface of land and water at a time when waterborne transportation accounted for nearly all long-distance human movement and trade. Modern New Orleans is located on a subsiding deltaic landscape and is surrounded by a rapidly eroding coast and rising seas. In spite of the great ecological and economic value of wetlands, the United States has lost half of its original wetlands. Louisiana leads the nation in terms of the number of coastal wetland acres lost, experiencing up to 80% of the nation’s loss due to anthropogenic and natural causes, including and exacerbated by sea-level rise and natural disasters. This situation, while draconian, is not unlike many other coastal settlements, and, thus, offers lessons, experiences, technologies, and test beds for human coastal environments worldwide. This paper focuses on emergent trends and ecosystem “shocks”, including climate change and hurricanes, along with resultant policies and practice that represent ecosystem adaptation, social-ecological learning, adaptive land use, and governance. Current structural and non-structural urban and coastal land use challenges and opportunities, with a special focus on the integrated New Orleans and coastal Louisiana ecosystems, will be discussed.