Galway needs coastal protection from rising waters

Coastal cities like Galway need to be ‘sitting up and taking notice’ as regards the latest data on the ongoing increase in sea levels, one of the country’s leading climatologists has warned.

Author and climatologist, Dr. Kieran Hickey, told the Galway City Tribune that if the trend in increasing sea levels wasn’t reversed, it would have major implications for coastal towns and, in cases, even further inland.

Earlier this month, the Irish Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a report in which it warned of the ongoing consequences of global warming on world sea levels.  Dr. Hickey, who now lectures at the Dept. of Geography at UCC (University College Cork), said that the rising sea levels would have a knock-on effect, adding to the severity of storms and high tides on coastal areas.

“The people of Galway city and places like Salthill won’t need any reminding of the problems caused by high tides, storms and flooding – the rising sea levels will increase their impact on coastal population centres like Galway,” said Dr. Hickey.

He said that the ever-increasing emissions from greenhouse gases had led to a warming of the oceans and a consequent thermal expansion of the sea water mass that then led to a rise in sea levels.

“The real catastrophe down the road though could come with the melting of the icecaps on land masses in the Antarctic in the Southern Hemisphere and in Greenland in the Northern Hemisphere.

“If there was a complete meltdown of those land ice masses, sometime into the future, this could result in a sea level increases in the region of six metres which would have catastrophic consequences for everyone,” said Dr. Hickey.

He said that while 20 years ago such a scenario would not even be considered, the ongoing trend with greenhouse emissions, global warming and rising sea levels now had pushed this scenario far higher up on the agenda.

“The issue of improving flood defences in vulnerable coastal areas will be coming more to the fore but the key problem goes back to greenhouse gas emissions and our warming waters.

“I see here in Cork that they are embarking on a raft of flood prevention measures costing around €80 million between now and 2022. While these works will be a help, everything goes back to the basic cause of the problem,” said Dr. Hickey.

He said that the gradual increase in sea levels was ‘insidious’ but its impact would really come into play whenever severe storms or particularly high tides hit a vulnerable coastal area.

“I think we can say with some certainty that the impact of the storms and the high tides will be that bit more severe over the coming years. Galway, and all other vulnerable coastal communities, do need to be concerned about this,” said Dr. Hickey.

According to the latest EPA report, sea levels around Ireland have risen by seven centimetres since the early 1990s.

The EPA report also noted that the winter wave conditions of 2013/2014 were the most energetic along the Atlantic coast of Ireland since 1948.

Referring to the problem of global warming, the EPA have warned that there is only ‘a very short time frame’ within which to act before irreversible changes occur to the planet.