What if We Can't Wait to Respond to Changes in Water and Coastal Resources Due to Climate Change? Lessons from Current Research and Oath of Fealty

摘要

IN A RECENT issue of Nature Communications, there is an article entitled "The evolution of human population distance to water in USA from 1790 to 2010." The authors Fang and Jawitz posit an interesting demographic concept supported by their research. In the early decades of the United States, human settlements developed close to available surface water resources, especially rivers. After 1870, with the nation going full-bore into the Industrial Revolution, development of the built environment moved away from rivers, as our ability to move water from where it is to where it is needed increased exponentially, enabled by technology. From other research, especially from the Census Bureau and NOAA, two other critical land use trends contribute to our understanding of land use and climate change: the urbanization and coastal densification of America. In approximately 1913, the nation shifted from being majority rural to majority urban, beginning a long-term trend. Today the split is approximately 20 percent rural and 80 percent urban, with the urban concentrated on about 3 percent of the total land area.