Having lived in Venice his whole life, it was no shock to 11-year-old Antonio when he had to wade through knee-deep water on his way to school one morning. He observed the oblivious tourists laughing and taking selfies in the flooded streets, ignorant of the disheartening and stressful situation for Venice’s residents. On this day, the 12th of November 2019, 85% of the city was flooded – the flooded water height was 1.87 meters high (see fig. 1) (Masters 2019). This case is just one example of how rising sea levels and climate change impacts coastal communities and threatens many homes.
Globally, around 100 million people live in low-lying areas with a mean elevation of one meter (Zhang et al, 2004). Continual increase in sea-level rise means an increase in coastal erosion, which threatens many shoreline communities. Many countries face coastal erosion as an issue, but it is the lesser economically developed nations that we should be concerned about. For example, India has lost 235 square kilometers of land due to coastal erosion between 1990 and 2016 (Jamwal 2019) (see fig. 2). This is an alarming rate of land loss considering that nearly 250 million people reside within 50km of India’s coastline, many of whom live off of the land. These people are unlikely able to afford the cost of moving when their homes become endangered and when the land is not fertile enough to farm anymore. This rise in sea levels is a result of human actions that have influenced global warming, and if this continues, we will start to face a large global issue that will affect millions of lives. Human interference combined with global warming speeds up this process of erosion.
North Carolina's Erosion 
