Vice News reports:

Five winters ago, one of the biggest local storm surges in 50 years hit Vancouver, a city on the front lines of climate change that’s also among the world’s most expensive places to own a home. “I got scared: ‘Oh, my God, we’re gonna flood,’” recalled Ricky Point, a member of Musqueam First Nation and part of the public works department.

Point had good reason to be frightened. The Musqueam reserve is located in southeast Vancouver on the banks of the Fraser River and exposed to the Pacific Ocean. Parts of the reserve are close to sea level and could be completely inundated by a flood even just a bit stronger than the norm.

But Point’s experience wasn’t universally felt among the Vancouver region’s roughly 2.8 million inhabitants. While he agonized over how bad the flooding would get, residents in the relatively nearby neighbourhood of Shaughnessy had much less to fear. This area of leafy streets where mansions have sold for as high as $33 million is 83 metres above sea level.

The storm was a close call. Water levels eventually receded around Musqueam after a few hours without causing much damage. “This will go down in history as the first summer Vancouver really experienced climate change,” a city official said in 2015, of a season that included wildfire smoke, unusually strong storm surges, water shortages, and above-average heat.

Vancouver reacted by commissioning flood experts and agreeing to spend tens of millions of dollars improving a decades-old system of dikes badly in need of repair.

But the year also contained a social warning that seems to have gone largely unheeded: If and when climate-intensified flooding inflicts catastrophic damage on Vancouver, many of the city’s richest residents could escape relatively unscathed. As global temperature rise gets worse over the coming decades, the disparity between the city’s most expensive areas and vulnerable communities like Musqueam could widen. [Continue reading…]