-The following is an original production of WLRN Public Media.

♪♪ It's early 2024 in South Florida.

Already, there are signs that another dangerous hurricane season will launch in just a few weeks.

♪♪ It's time to prepare for the next round of hotter temperatures, more frequent floods, and stronger tropical storms.

South Floridians have long lived on the front lines of climate change, yet some are not just enduring the impacts of global warming.

They're responding with resolve.

They are researchers tracking storm patterns, academics studying community resilience, artists and activists rallying communities, citizen scientists and public servants helping their neighborhoods adapt to a hotter, wetter world.

[ Thunder crashes ] 2024 would prove to be another year of firsts and of records shattered.

The earliest hurricane, the wettest day, the hottest year.

As extreme weather like this spreads around the globe, the response of South Florida's climate-action community to its challenges offers hard-earned lessons for the rest of us.

These are different stories, united by a common theme.

There's still much work to do to face the realities of climate change, and each of us can play a role in shaping our planet's future.

♪♪ -What we are facing is nothing like what we have faced before.

-We're seeing the effects today.

We're seeing the flooding.

We're seeing the extreme heat.

-There hasn't been a year like this before.

-I worry that we are not moving fast enough.

-If we keep our head in the sand, I think we lose the fight.

-We don't have a day to waste.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Okay.

I think we're really going to get started now.

-Michael Berkowitz has spent a dozen years working around the globe to help communities prepare for the impacts of global warming.

Now he's settled in South Florida to head up the University of Miami's Climate Resilience Institute.

♪♪ -What's unique about South Florida is that we are struggling with many of the same challenges that cities all over the world are struggling with, but in some ways, it's more acute.

And you can see it much, much clearer.

You can see the water lapping at our shore's edge.

You can see the big hurricanes.

It's baked into our DNA, our relationship with coastal and climate hazards.

[ Chatter ] -It's Earth Week, and the institute has convened a group that includes politicians and scientists, experts in water, housing, and infrastructure to share ideas and research on the complex set of issues that the era of climate change is bringing to South Florida's doorstep.

-Obviously, nature can throw curveballs and who knows, but the expectations as of now are for a very active season.

The ocean temperatures in the Tropical Atlantic are the warmest they've ever been for this time of year.

They've actually been record-breakingly warm for over 13 months.

When there's things out there that remotely could have our name written on them, I don't sleep.

[ Laughs ] -The main theme of the day is climate resilience.

-So many experts and mentors and friends who have taught me so much about resilience.

-Resilience is a set of capacities that communities have to survive and thrive in the face of disasters.

We usually think about, you know, good emergency management and first responders, which are super important.

We often think about good infrastructure, seawalls, and drainage systems and good building codes.

That's important, too, but we have come to understand more about how communities perform during and after disaster, and it has a lot to do with social cohesion.

-The first responder is your neighbors 'cause, in a lot of communities, they really are.

-It was really Andrew that set the precedent for how we're approaching climate in this country.

Our climate adaptation policy in this country is disaster policy.

-Resilience is a battle that gets fought block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.

You're really talking about, how do you improve individual neighborhoods' posture vis-à-vis resilience?

How do you improve equity at the neighborhood scale?

Connected neighbors.

Social infrastructure.

All of those things are going to be the things that help the communities in Miami survive the next climate shock.

-Berkowitz believes that Florida's unique vulnerabilities also make the region a prime testing ground for potential resilience solutions.

-I think South Florida could be a real leader in climate resilience.

The frequency and severity of the climate shocks and stresses that we experience here in South Florida make this a very interesting place to do research around resilience.

We are going to be able to pilot and test different kinds of resilience solutions and get feedback on that much more quickly than some other parts of the country and the world.

-There's no silver bullet.

There's no one single solution that will bring salvation.

You can't say, "Oh, I'll just fix climate."

There's no fix for climate.

This is a global effort that we will see locally as much as a community-led action that we will have to propel to a global level.

-We don't have a moment to waste.

This is an absolutely urgent problem.

When will the waters make downtown Miami or the beaches or Brickell uninhabitable?

That, I don't totally know.

It depends on which models you believe.

But what resilience allows us to do is buy some time and improve people's lives in those communities right now.

♪♪ -We're in what's called the Stillwright Point neighborhood in Key Largo.

This is the most vulnerable area in the entire Florida Keys.

-Rhonda Haag's job is to deal with the impacts of global warming already being felt up and down the Florida Keys.

-And every year, it gets a little bit worse.

We see more and more water on these roads in this neighborhood.

And quite frankly, the neighbors, you know, they're tired of it.

-We're five streets with 212 houses in here.

And the problem is, when North Blackwater floods, every house, to access the outside world, has to drive North Blackwater.

This is the corner where it's the lowest.

And it'll get in here-- Because of the mangroves, it'll get 17, 18 inches deep on this corner.

Most cars can't handle that, so it's not a good safety situation whatsoever.

-When I came to the position-- it's been 13 years now-- there was no sea-level rise program in the county.

We had seen, you know, an inch or two of water on roads here and there up to that point, but 2015 really seemed to be the turn-point year where the king tides just came in much further and much deeper and lasted longer, and it's been increasing ever since.

-In 2019, that was when we were flooded for 94 days straight, and it was just a non-livable condition, and we thought it would not get any worse than that.

And then last year, we were well over 100-and-some days.

-We're meeting at our county commission meeting in April with the neighbors and the residents, and we're going to determine whether we're going to move forward with a "short-term fix," maybe five to seven years at a cost of $5 or $6 million, or whether we keep moving forward with a long-term solution, resilience solution, which at this time is estimated at $40 million, which could be even more now with the bids that are starting to come in.

So that's going to be the big decision here to be made very soon.

[ Gavel bangs ] -Good morning, everybody.

Welcome to the Wednesday, April 17, 2024, regular Board of County Commission meeting.

-They were frustrated and asked us to come and present today on what we could do for something more short-term.

They were hoping that it could be quicker and cheaper.

Last time you saw us was in January when you approved the task order.

We did the analysis in order to stick with the regulations.

We're not able to give them the 6 inches of paving.

So that's not what they wanted to hear, which I understand.

I would be frustrated, also.

They don't like the message that was being delivered, so, you know, there were some attacks on the message.

-Hello again.

I would rather be getting a root canal than having to come and speak to you again.

We were told that the county was going to address this issue.

We've been working with the members in Monroe County for years, years, more years, to come to some kind of solution.

I mean, we're at the point where... don't tell us what you can't do for us.

Please tell us what you can do for us.

There's no money.

We're trying to work with you to get some kind of a system in place that will help us and get us out of your hair.

And we're not the only neighborhood.

It's gonna be all of the Keys at some point.

-Thank you, Kim.

-Thank you.

-Today's discussion with the Stillwright Point community in Key Largo is really one that we're probably gonna see over and over and over again.

This is what we're looking at.

This is the future of the Keys and of Florida.

People want to be able to stay here, we have to work through these issues.

-We're at the forefront of what's happening to other coastal communities around the U.S.

and around the world, and with the spotlight on us, I sincerely hope that our county achieves success in this and that there's a great resolution because it's not just for us.

It's for the rest of the world to take a look at and to model after.

♪♪ -In the climate crisis, we have two big buckets that are the solutions.

One bucket requires solutions that mitigate the causes of the climate crisis.

Another solution is adapting.

Adaptation requires us to deal with the crisis that's right here, right now.

We need both.

We can't just adapt, and we can't just mitigate without worrying about those that are most affected right now.

-Caroline Lewis is a former science teacher and high-school principal.

She's the founder of The CLEO Institute, a Florida-based organization focused on education and community engagement.

-So the reason I founded The CLEO Institute is I wanted to create access points for everybody, that you can find a way to come into the conversation to understand how this climate crisis is affecting you.

-CLEO kicks off Earth Week with an early-morning 5K run along Biscayne Bay.

-Good morning, everyone.

Welcome to CLEO's annual 5K.

My name is Dania Toledo.

I am a Miami-Dade County youth organizer with The CLEO Institute's genCLEO program, and I'd like to welcome all our runners, all our walkers, and all our friends here who came to celebrate this Earth Day with us today.

-Four, three, two, one!

Go!

-[ Cheers and applause ] -They're off!

-Run for the future!

Run, run, run!

-Showing up and seeing just the sheer number of people who came to not only just run a 5K, but do it with the intention of bringing attention to the impacts of climate change was really overwhelming and super-inspiring.

It goes to show more people care about our Earth and our climate than we might think.

[ Bell ringing ] -Thank you.

-The urgency of the climate crisis demands agency in every one of us.

People say to me, "Please, Caroline.

No gloom and doom."

I said, "No, I'll put the gloom and doom on the table because it's here... but I'll give you access points out of it and where you can use your energy, where you can be a part of the solution by saying, 'We have the solutions.

We know what to do.

How do we just get it done?

How can I help drive that change?'"

-In this year, in 2024, I want to make the issue of sea-level rise impossible to ignore.

-Xavier Cortada is a Miami artist and climate activist.

He's using his art to draw people into the public discussion around global warming.

Cortada has been invited to cap off Earth Week 2024 in Fort Lauderdale at a community event hosted by Broward County.

-Please join me in welcoming Xavier.

Thank you.

[ Applause ] -Most of the reasons that people don't talk about climate, it used to be because they didn't believe it.

Others say it's too big of a problem.

You know?

Like it can't be solved.

Others say science and technology will take care of that.

Others will say, "It's not my problem.

It's the government's problem."

And some say, "It's because I can't.

Because I'm nobody.

I have no voice."

But if you create a process that gives people voice, that gives people an opportunity to come together and work together and feel like "we're in this, we got this," then you start beginning inspiring conversations.

You start having people think creatively.

You start having people connect with one another and figure out, "Well, maybe there's something I can do to raise awareness so that we can start, as a society, taking this problem as seriously as it is."

-After everybody was sitting there and listening and we had, you know, a little Q&A session, kind of like a town hall, we had everybody then come back out into the foyer and participate in the underwater project.

There's this whole interactive participatory art project that'll be happening right out there.

The hopeful part of this is that all of us get to be part of the solution, and all of you are getting one of Xavier's Antarctic ice paintings.

You see everybody scanning the QR codes, typing their address, creating their yard sign with their home's personal elevation.

-Okay.

Go!

Ooh!

There you go.

And actually...6.

-It's a fun, uplifting environment.

It's not, "Oh, my God.

We're all gonna drown."

You know?

It's, "Okay.

We have a problem.

But we can come together and we can solve this problem."

-Today in Miami, there are millions of us who are impacted by the threat of climate, but we act as if... business as usual, as if everything's okay.

And that disconnect is what I hope art can come in and help address, help solve.

And if we can just see that, that the problem is real and it's ours and that we can solve it, then I think we're going to be better off in addressing it instead of ignoring it.

♪♪ -With forecasters predicting a daunting number of storms, the six-month hurricane season starts tomorrow.

♪♪ -So we're preparing for four, maybe five storms to hit the state of Florida.

You know, I figure if we're ready for that, then we should be good to go.

♪♪ -Alex Harris is the first climate-change reporter at the Miami Herald and one of the first local climate-change reporters in the country.

-I think the reason the climate-change conversation is so far forward in South Florida is because we get to see things.

There are really real, tangible human impacts of climate change, and you're going to see them a lot more in Miami than you are in someplace like Idaho.

When you can physically see the symptoms and the effects of climate change, you're more receptive to the message and you're more interested in solutions.

-Well, all the rain that South Florida will see for most of this week is not a tropical storm, but it sure will look and feel like it.

-We knew it was going to flood the weekend before.

We started seeing the National Weather Service and NOAA warning that there was probably going to be a really big rainstorm in South Florida that would probably lead to some flooding.

-"Higher ground.

Extremely dangerous.

Life-threatening situation.

Do not travel.

Turn around, don't drown."

Okay.

Well... [ Laughs ] Love that in my neighborhood.

-Please avoid driving through flooded roads or walking through moving water.

-By Monday, we were pretty sure it was going to happen on Tuesday, and so we had scrambled reporters, scrambled photographers who were ready to go.

And on Tuesday, it really started raining in the afternoon.

The first big rush of the rain happened right at rush hour, and so people were stuck.

I was driving home from the office, and the highway had already started to flood a little bit.

I knew the worst of the rain was going to happen overnight, so I knew once I got home I'd be okay, but I was a bit worried I wasn't going to make it, but I did.

I have a back route I take when it floods because one of the major roads in my neighborhood that I take most of the time floods pretty terribly, and I didn't feel like getting stuck in that.

So I made it home like 4:00 or 5:00 p.m.

on Tuesday, and as the sun went down that evening, it really started to flood.

I started getting calls from sources, from the photographers we'd sent out, from the reporters we'd sent out that the waters were rising.

They were covering whole streets, which were impossible to pass because there was just dozens and dozens of cars that were stalled and you couldn't drive around them.

So to avoid them, people tried to move off the side of the road and ended up in canals.

They ended up in ditches.

Ambulances couldn't get where they needed to go.

It was a whole mess.

Dropped as much as two feet of rain in some places.

Even parts of the major highway, I-95, were underwater, and people couldn't drive on parts of it.

It was a really big storm.

Especially flooded in my neck of the woods in my neighborhood.

Yeah, this is my street in Hollywood.

This was on day one of the flooding.

I wore ankle-high flood boots that was not high enough, so they immediately got soaked.

And I got a little bit nervous because it came pretty far up.

This whole road was underwater.

And I live a little up that street.

My home didn't flood, thankfully, but my street did, and it was knee-high for days, and I just felt like I was on edge for the next few days waiting for these floodwaters to recede.

Meanwhile, I was getting all these photos from the photographers of this man with the water into his car when he opened the door.

This is a library of the photos that the Herald took.

And we had some drone aerial shots.

You can see that even whole neighborhoods were sort of underwater.

Oh, yeah, you can see here all the different stalled-out cars.

People still tried to get to work and school and everything, even though it was terrible outside.

And this is a gentleman, Asif, who told us that his house flooded so many times, he was done.

This was cleaning up afterwards, and he said, "I just-- I can't do this anymore.

My daughter's bedroom has flooded like three separate times.

I don't want to live down here anymore."

This gentleman decided to create his own flood pump.

He just was tired of waiting for the city to help and just took matters into his own hands.

This was maybe my favorite picture from the June floods.

This is a couple.

Victor.

He and his wife went to a doctor's appointment earlier that day, and they were two flooded to get their car home, so they parked the car in a CVS parking lot, and he pushed his wife for more than 20 minutes through more of a mile of flooded road in her wheelchair to get her home.

These floods aren't just an inconvenience for some people.

Like, "Oh, I'm going to be a little bit late 'cause there's some traffic."

They're a financial burden.

I talked to some woman yesterday who told me that the latest flood in June caused $7,000 worth of flooding in her home.

She was lucky enough to get $1,000 from FEMA, but because it's not considered a disaster, the federal government doesn't step in and help you.

There's a lot people don't know about what's going to happen in the future, and I think stories like this are really important to underline the actual toll of climate change.

This is the sort of flood that is going to become more common.

It's not record-breaking.

It's not a hurricane.

It's going to be on the backs of South Florida taxpayers and residents to just bear this burden.

And it's not going to just happen one time a year.

It's going to happen a lot more often than that.

-Brian McNoldy is a senior researcher at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science.

He runs the Tropical Atlantic Update blog from his office on Key Biscayne.

-See what's going on out there.

I look for waves coming off of Africa.

That's always a big thing starting this time of year.

But right now things look pretty quiet.

We're almost two months into hurricane season.

So far, we've had an extremely active season.

Might not seem like it, but we've actually had three named storms already.

Alberto and Chris fairly forgettable storms, but Hurricane Beryl was one for the history books.

The end of June, there was a tropical wave that exited the African coast, and although that generally starts happening around then, those African easterly waves, they're called, usually meet a fairly hostile environment this time of year.

Here.

This is all Saharan dust streaming off of the continent.

So, in late June, to have something like that happen was really quite amazing.

It became the furthest-east hurricane to form in June.

-Hurricane Beryl plowed its way into history over the weekend after it rapidly intensified and became the earliest Category 4 storm on record for the Atlantic, going back nearly 175 years.

-Then it went on and became a Category 5 hurricane in the Caribbean.

-It's an unprecedented hurricane for the time of year and for the area that it's striking, regardless... -Of all the tropical cyclones that form in the Atlantic, only 3% to 3.5% of them become Category 5 hurricanes.

-This is a part of the Caribbean that is not accustomed to having hurricanes.

-By this morning, winds had climbed to 165 miles per hour.

-So it's an extremely rare thing to happen ever any time of year.

To happen when it did, which was about two and a half months before we would normally see a hurricane like that, it was absolutely extraordinary.

-Atmospheric conditions are partly to blame, but it's also due to high ocean temperatures.

-The ocean temperatures in the Atlantic start breaking records in the spring of 2023, and they just took off.

And that really has not let up.

You don't normally break records continuously for 14 months.

You keep wondering when it's going to get back to "normal," whatever that means now.

It is hard to wrap your head around as you're watching it.

We're kind of all just watching it at the same time and wondering how it ends.

♪♪ [ Birds calling ] -Florida is really front and center for climate-change impacts.

We're a peninsula.

We are experiencing heat, fire, floods, and storms.

A good thing is that we have lots of tools available that allows us to address these important risks for both our natural and human communities.

My name is Dr.

Josh Daskin, director of conservation at Archbold Biological Station.

Archbold's mission is to produce and share the science needed to protect Florida's life, lands, and waters.

The Florida Wildlife Corridor is a really ambitious vision for conserving 18 million acres-- that's nearly half the state of Florida-- as connected wildlife habitats for wildlife, but also with many benefits for people and human communities.

We at Archbold are mostly biologists, and so when we wanted to convene a group to work on the question of how does land conservation and wildlife protection affect climate resilience, we partnered with Florida Atlantic University and asked them to lead a report on all the ways that conserving connected lands in the Florida Wildlife Corridor can impact climate resilience.

-Our report often felt a bit lonely.

As one does when writing a report, you look for others that have been already written and you try and model them, and there weren't any that we could find.

The reason is the Florida Wildlife Corridor is itself a model.

-...both wildlife and working economies... -It is arguably more advanced and more muscular than any other such corridor you can see in the country and perhaps the world.

And if those lands get converted, then what I see is going to be similar, right?

So our report that looks not only at the corridor but how it intersects climate resilience could be a model for other locations to do the same thing.

-...continue doing things that are good for wildlife, good for communities, good for economies... Ecologists and biologists have understood the importance of habitat connectivity for wildlife for a very long time, but there are relatively few projects of this scale and that are this well-defined.

So Florida is actually really at the cutting edge globally for how to do this kind of work.

[ Animals calling ] By having large connected swaths of land in the Florida Wildlife Corridor that are conserved permanently, it makes it much easier to manage prescribed fires and wildfires, reducing risk for people and improving habitat management for wildlife.

On the flooding side, two thirds of Florida's floodplains are inside the Florida Wildlife Corridor.

Conserving them reduces potential future insurance risks and keeps those floodplains working as natural sponges that absorb the huge amounts of rainfall that we get and the downstream flow after a storm.

-Here, what you have is a state that has committed to putting aside half of its land acreage to conservation, and that is in the context of increasing demand for that land.

Population is going through the roof.

It's a boom again.

-The real decisions about the future of ecosystems in the state are land-use decisions.

Who gets to decide what that area is zoned for is deciding the future of that area.

Those lands that are in a conservation use or a rural-land use or an agricultural use, those lands that aren't already developed, those are the lands we need to be protecting.

Just holding the line there, that is probably the single most important thing we can be doing, big-picture, in Florida to help meet the climate and sea-level rise challenge.

-The Florida Wildlife Corridor can be a model for many other places that are experiencing this tension between growing human populations.

We have one of the fastest- growing state populations in the country and really great natural resources.

Here in Florida, we have among the most species that are federally listed as endangered or threatened of any state.

So we have that tension right here.

And the Florida Wildlife Corridor is, so far, a very successful vision for how to deal with both of those challenges.

♪♪ [ Chatter ] -Every summer, The CLEO Institute leadership hosts a field trip for institute interns and staffers.

It's a way to connect young activists to the natural world and fire them up in their fight for the future.

-...to see this area... -This year, they're going to the Everglades.

[ Chatter ] -There was a lot of excitement surrounding actually going to the Everglades.

It was some people's first time, mine included.

And we took the bus through Tamiami Trail to the Everglades, where we met up with someone from the Everglades Foundation, Dr.

Chabba, who was absolutely amazing.

A wealth of knowledge.

-Our water system is being compromised because... -She started speaking to us a little bit about the importance of the Everglades, how it functions in purifying our water, the importance it has to the Florida ecosystem as a whole.

-The water that's being sent into the Biscayne Aquifer, our source of water, is being challenged by climate change because as sea levels... -From there, we took the airboat ride, which was very surprisingly loud.

I had never been on an airboat, so it was very loud and very windy.

[ Whirring ] ♪♪ ♪♪ We'd stop every so often, and Dr.

Chabba would tell us a bit more about where we were at, telling us how the difference in elevation, even slight, leads to massive differences in the type of flora and fauna that live in that area.

-It's all about restoring the water flow.

It is about creating storage.

-Even getting out and doing a demonstration in the water.

-100 miles down south... -She's much braver than I am.

It was honestly a lot of fun.

It was very exciting seeing a lot of areas that I had never been to before and that the average person doesn't see on their day-to-day.

Like, it's in the middle of the water.

No one's just out there wading in the water for fun.

♪♪ Living in Florida, and living in South Florida in particular, you kind of hear a lot about how important the Everglades is, but being there and seeing it in person was kind of a way to remind ourselves of why we need to preserve the Everglades.

We stand to lose a lot for not doing enough.

[ All cheering ] -Perfect!

Thank you!

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -The National Weather Service has issued a coastal flood advisory for all of South Florida.

-We've covered so many heat advisories all over South Florida that we're starting to get worried about sounding repetitive.

-The National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory today for the entire region.

The maximum... -A heat advisory is in effect for all of South Florida today from 10:00 a.m.

through 6:00 p.m.

-It's mid-September, the peak of hurricane season.

After a dramatic start, the Tropical Atlantic is strangely quiet, but the heat on land is shaping up to continue 2023's record-breaking run.

-We're not unique in the fact that we face sea-level rise.

We're not unique in the fact that we deal with extreme heat.

We're not unique in the fact that it rains a lot.

But we are unique in the fact that we're dealing with all those things at the same time, right?

So we have heat, hurricane season, flooding, even, at times, drought all at the same time.

-Nkosi Muse is a meteorologist and scientist working toward his PhD in climate policy at the University of Miami.

He also serves as the vice chair of the city's Climate Resilience Committee.

-I'm a meteorologist by training.

At first, it was I wanted to be a broadcast meteorologist until I realized I don't want to talk just about whether you need an umbrella every day.

That's important, but I feel like there's more I can do with this expertise that I've been able to gain, and that turned into the climate-policy realm.

How do I apply my expertise from climate dynamics and meteorology and just the atmosphere to how we address climate threats here on the ground and help people?

[ Chatter ] -In his research, Muse is exploring how we measure heat can impact heat policy.

-I'm working on my dissertation right now, and that's focused on how we use land-surface temperature as a tool to assess heat threats in seasonally muggy climates, climates that have monsoons like Miami does.

We don't need to name our heat waves, you know?

We don't really have heat waves.

We have consistent heat.

There is a direct line from the research that I do to the resolutions that we write for the city of Miami.

Now that we've identified that land-surface temperature and air temperature don't necessarily follow the same annual patterns... Land-surface temperature is highest in May.

Air temperature's highest in August, right?

So land-surface temperature may not be able to be used to identify many of the different heat threats i n the city of Miami.

So that's a direct line from the work that I'm doing in the research lab to the actual policy.

-The National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory today for the entire region.

-"Feels like" temperatures could reach 113 degrees.

-So one of the biggest ways you can see the effects of a warming world in South Florida is how much hotter it's gotten.

If you look back to 1960, scientists say we had about 80, 90 days of the year that were above 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

And in modern times, we're seeing more like 130 days a year at that temperature.

But if you keep on track and keep releasing all the fossil fuels into the atmosphere and don't address climate change in a meaningful way, that number is only supposed to go up.

By 2050, we could see 180, 190 days of the year where temperatures are above 90 degrees.

That's the majority of the year.

That's a lot of time where it's too hot to work, it's too hot to stand in the sun and wait for a bus.

There are so many ways that our community would be deeply impacted if we had double the amount of days above 90 that we had in 1960.

-The National Weather Service says "feels like" temperatures could reach 108 degrees in some areas.

Scattered showers and thunderstorms could bring some relief to the heat, but there's also a chance for localized flooding.

-While we might see record-breaking street flooding in South Florida this weekend, it has nothing to do with any tropical storm.

Between today and next Wednesday, we can expect one of the largest high tides of the year, known as king tides.

-Levels of Virginia Key have broken records for the last two days during this week's king tides.

Forecasters say tidal flooding could also be worsened by afternoon and evening rainstorms.

♪♪ -King-tide season follows closely on the heels of peak hurricane season.

In the Keys, the flooding isn't as bad as it has been in recent years, and the Stillwright Point residents have just received some good news.

-Right now we've already got one grant for $20 million.

The county has, wonderfully, met the deadline to apply for the second grant for another $20 million.

And that was on September 1st, and I think we don't hear until the 1st of the year something like that, so we are extremely hopeful that we get this grant money because it would make, at least currently, a world of difference to us to not be prisoners in our own home because of floodwater.

We are a pilot project, so they want to see what spending this money and what the current popular solution is with injection wells and pumps and raising the street... They want to see if it's successful or not.

Then it can be applied to other places in the county or other places in the state or elsewhere.

We've had media from Sweden, from Germany, from France, from Great Britain, from Ireland, from Denmark.

We've had a lot of other countries looking at what Monroe County, the Keys are doing to solve this because they're facing issues themselves.

I'm extremely hopeful with it.

I'm hopeful that we get the second grant for another $20 million because then it's ready to start the project, and I think the project will take 18 months to two years, something like that.

And, okay, I know that the streets will be awful.

They'll be dug up.

Good sacrifice to make if the solution is no more of this.

-For nine years running, Florida International University has been using citizen scientists to collect flooding data during the fall king tides.

-Today is FIU's Sea Level Solutions Day.

It's an annual event where they take teams of students and volunteers, and they spread out across Miami on the highest high tide of the year, and they measure how high king tides have gotten.

I'm here today because I'm helping out a student who's covering it for my environmental journalism class, but I'm also, while I'm here, writing a story for the Miami Herald.

We're expecting potentially record-breaking high tide today, so it feels like a good idea to be around with some of the scientists and experts who are tracking it on the ground.

-Your role today in Sea Level Solutions is we're collecting data to see what's happening on the ground.

Take your kit out, and we're going to just go over the contents of it together and see how to use the equipment that we have.

-Because tidal events happen over such a short period of time, we can get a broad geographic distribution of sampling that's only possible because everyone comes here to work with us to take those samples at the same time, when we expect the highest high tide to occur.

-This event is really cool because it brings climate science from the classroom out into the public square.

People who want to be involved are invited to become citizen scientists for the day, and they get to go out and learn about, like, what kind of science actually is necessary to understand the future that lies in front of us.

-These actual field observations help us to understand where and when we may get the greatest or not as much flooding.

This information helps to prioritize flood adaptation strategies and projects.

-King tides are a glimpse of what the future looks like with sea-level rise.

We're expecting about two feet of sea-level rise by 2050, 2060, and today we're expecting to see the king tides are about two feet higher than normal.

So for some cities across the East Coast, this is what it looks like 30 years from now.

♪♪ [ Thunder crashes ] ♪♪ -Late in the season, the Tropical Atlantic wakes up.

Brian McNoldy's main concern, hot ocean temperatures, begin spawning tropical storms, and they're finding favorable conditions for development.

-At this point, with six weeks left of the hurricane season, we've seen a fairly average season measured by conventional metrics.

In terms of impacts, it's been an exceptionally active season.

We actually had five hurricanes make landfall along the U.S.

Gulf Coast.

There's only been one year on record where there were more than that, and that was 1886, when there were six.

-For almost three decades, McNoldy has tracked storms on his hand-drawn wall map.

-Look at this track map of the activity so far this hurricane season.

We saw Tropical Storm Helene form on September 24th.

That's this first dot here.

And then it tracks north through the Eastern Gulf.

-We continue to closely monitor Tropical Storm Helene, which is making a beeline for Northwest Florida.

-That's what the models had been showing all along, was whatever and whenever exactly this thing forms, it would track north and it would intensify.

-We are expecting Helene to strengthen into a major hurricane as it spins over the very warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

-Another aspect of that storm that the models picked up on was that it was going to be moving quickly.

These points are spread six hours apart.

You can kind of see how they're moving.

They're relatively close down here then become very spread out up here, which means its speed is increasing.

So it carried those strong hurricane-force winds well inland compared to what a hurricane would if it were moving at a more average speed.

-Helene is expected to make landfall after 9:00 p.m.

in Florida's Big Bend region as a major hurricane.

-It made landfall and did not waste any time.

It just cruised on north.

♪♪ -Hurricane Helene left an enormous path of destruction across Florida and the entire Southeastern U.S., killing nearly 100 people and causing $15 billion to $26 billion in property damage.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Milton was another storm that I think we kind of saw coming well before it formed.

♪♪ This one intensified at a rate that's quite uncommon.

[Chuckles] I mean, it went from a Category 1 storm to a Category 5 storm in just nine hours.

That's an amazing intensification rate.

This was Milton as a Category 1 hurricane.

2, 3, 4, 5.

[ Chuckles ] So that stretch from where it's orange to yellow in the markers that I use, that was a nine-hour stretch.

-Hurricane Milton rapidly intensified in the Gulf of Mexico and is expected to hit the heavily populated Tampa Bay area by Wednesday.

-And then as it moved eastward across the Gulf of Mexico, its wind field expanded.

-The storm now has maximum sustained winds of 130 miles an hour.

-It weakened and eventually made landfall near Sarasota as a Category 3, right near Tampa, Tampa Bay area, which is extraordinarily rare.

Due to the shape of the coastline and climatological hurricane tracks, it's a hard spot to hit.

-Some areas in Tampa Bay are still feeling the effects of flooding from Hurricane Milton.

-Some of the rivers, over the next several days, we're going to see those water levels dropping.

And, you know, it may take a week or more, two weeks, before they're back below flood levels.

♪♪ [ Children shouting playfully ] [ Cellphone rings ] -Hello?

Hey.

I'm walking in.

There you are.

[ Camera shutter clicks ] I think, at one level, the idea of having this conversation here about the future of Miami and about the impact of climate on Miami and how all of us need to work together as a community at a municipality literally on an island dredged out of the bay, it's a good place to have that conversation.

I'm really, really happy to hear that.

[Laughs] -How are you?

-Hi.

Great.

-Nice to see you.

-Good to see you, too.

This is such a beautiful, you know, gathering.

Thank you.

-Yeah.

No.

It looks great.

Now we just need people here.

-Yeah.

That's true.

That is true.

Um... -I was telling Adam, like... -We are in the beginning of this initiative where we are installing sustainable concrete elevation sculptures across every single Miami-Dade County park.

There are over 250 county parks that are receiving these site-specific elevation sculptures that are really portals to climate education and activism because they have QR codes embedded and they're weird, so people are like, "What does this number mean?"

You scan it, you find out how vulnerable we are to sea-level rise and to climate change, and then you see how you can get involved.

-And I just want you to not lose hope.

Because this is how we start.

You know, this is how we do it, little by little, planting these little seeds, and I think in time, um, we'll be listened to, I hope.

I hope with enough time.

-Yeah.

I hope so.

-That's my drama.

[ Chatter ] This place is vulnerable to sea-level rise.

If we do exactly what we are doing now, scientists tell us that there will be 6 to 7 feet of sea-level rise by the end of the century, which means you and I will be standing on seawater.

Not seawater that comes and recedes after a flood, but seawater that's permanent.

This would be the new sort of landscape-- seascape, let's call it, of this park.

Each and every single one of you are people of consequence, and the actions you take or fail to take will impact the Heart of the Bay, this beautiful island, will impact Miami-Dade County.

And because we are ground zero and because we are trying to experiment, trying to find solutions to our climate crisis, we'll have an impact on how our planet copes with this catastrophe that's in front of us.

-One, two, three.

-Heart of the Bay!

-Heart of the Bay!

-Hey!

-Yeah.

[ Applause ] -There are billions of dollars' worth of development that are going to take place in this very island, and that actually positions this island in an unusual location.

It's one of the most vulnerable places, but it gives it a tax base that will allow it to use its resources to adapt through time.

In time, I don't know that anyone wins unless we really take this climate seriously, but I do believe, in the decades to come, there is some leadership that can be exerted, and this will be an island of people that will have more wealth.

And I just want to, today as I dedicate this sculpture that marks the elevation of this property, plant the seed on the future citizens who will use this park and inhabit all the condos that will rise around this to understand that the seas are rising and that they are not an island.

No man is an island, and in the case of Miami-Dade County, no island is an island.

We're all literally in this together.

And that there need to be ways of understanding that there are donor communities, that there are shared responsibilities, and that there are things that we need to do as a society that are complex but require for our own personal self-interest that we think of the other as we engage in policies that move our society forward.

So that's why I'm here today.

♪♪ -The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season will end this week.

Debby, Helene, and Milton have been tied to 63 deaths here in Florida, and together, the three hurricanes have also drawn more than 300,000 insurance claims by Florida homeowners, with estimated losses at $5 billion dollars.

♪♪ -When I walk around a landscape, I'm constantly looking at water-management infrastructure and green infrastructure.

I'm looking at seawalls and seawall heights and disparity in infrastructure.

It's all I see when I walk around the community, and, frankly, it's always on my mind.

-It's the week before Christmas, the end of the year and time for the annual climate summit first organized by Broward County's Chief Resilience officer, Dr.

Jennifer Jurado, back in 2009.

16 years later, 400 of the region's climate practitioners gather in Key West to compare notes on their resilience projects and plans.

-One, two, one, two.

Check.

Test.

-Next, we have Dr.

Jennifer Jurado, Chief Resilience Officer... -The Compact Summit provides an opportunity once a year for all of those who are working on resilience, climate mitigation, and adaptation efforts to come together, look at what's been accomplished in this last year, kind of reassess the challenges that we're all facing as a community.

We have documented immense progress over the years.

-The Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact is probably the most positive governmental response to the sea-level rise and climate challenge in Florida that I've seen in the 35 years I've worked on these issues.

Having a regional entity that sets basic guidance and provides technical assistance and science to each local government that they can then apply to their own particular set of circumstances on the ground and on the shore, that's the right approach.

I think that's something that the compact really got right.

-So it is 16 years since we started all this.

-There wouldn't be a resilience program here in the Keys if it wasn't for the Climate Compact.

I have to really give a lot of credit to the Climate Compact and its founders, who thought about the future and were able to help us form this organization.

And now here we are.

It's really come a long way.

Doesn't mean we don't got a long way to go, because we do.

-We're really at an inflection point in South Florida.

We get to figure out whether all of what we've been saying for years and years and years about climate adaptation being necessary and that some of these projects have to happen... There's a necessity for them now.

They've become bipartisan.

They're less political.

Well, we've been saying that for years.

Now we get to test if that's actually true.

-In 2024, given the current political situation, local partnerships, those are going to be more important to drive climate action than ever.

Because on the one hand, there are so many challenges.

There is this widening inequity.

There is this seeming sort of unplanned development.

There are the worsening climate shocks, the warming waters, the bleaching corals.

We can go through all of the litany of trouble.

But also here you have a vibrant economy with money to spend on innovation.

You have an ecosystem of innovators in the universities and the private sector and government.

And so the vision, I think, should be that we have the resources to solve some of these wicked problems.

Southeast Florida can lead the world in climate innovation.

♪♪ -In all the places that I've done any kind of climate work or have seen climate work happening, Miami has a community that is really committed to trying to change, as far as prepare for different hazards, and also lessen its contributions to overall global warming.

-The whole reason to reduce our energy use and reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions is to slow down warming of the Earth and the atmosphere so the glaciers stop melting and the sea levels will slow down.

But even if all that is implemented today and it's all perfect, we're still going to see sea-level rise for quite a while.

So I fully anticipate swaths of islands going underwater.

The lower-lyings go first.

Moving inward as it progresses down in the next coming decades.

And just depending on how successful the world is and everybody doing their part will determine what we see here in the Keys.

-I interviewed this guy who once said, "This is the first time in human history where we are settling someplace we know will not be here in the future."

And that informs everything I write and everything I think and everything I see and consume about climate change in South Florida.

You are living in a fantasy land if you think every scrap of it will be here in 50 years, but you're also living in a fantasy land if you think that everyone is going to orderly stand up and abandon their billions of dollars of real estate and walk away with their hands up.

-When it comes down and all is said and done, we are not all in the same boat, as people like to tell me.

We are in the same storm, but we're riding out the storm differently.

Some people are in yachts.

others are in motorboats.

Some are in little dinghies.

Some are in the water with a life jacket.

And some are in the water just flailing.

So all of us need to embrace the journey and understand it's a journey we're all on, whether we want to be on it or not.

♪♪ -We stand at the precipice of catastrophe, but we're also here to help the rest of the planet understand how to address that catastrophe.

And if we become that kind of community, not only will we transform ourselves, but we'll find a better future.

We have the capacity.

We have the strength.

We just have to believe in ourselves and believe the truth of what's happening to us.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -For more information on "Facing the Future," visit facingthefuturedocumentary.org.

"Facing the Future: South Florida versus Climate Change" is available on DVD for $25, plus shipping and handling.

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