New Orleans has always known how to live with death, to the point where it’s almost a cliche. When they’re not playing in a second line or in a jazz club, for example, musicians tell tourists that they “put the fun in funerals.”
We even bury our dead above ground because the city sits below sea level, and anything underneath will inevitably wash away. Brick and stucco tombs cluster in our “Cities of the Dead,” with some cemeteries dating from 1789 — back when the city was an amalgam of French Creoles, Spanish settlers, Choctaw traders, and West African and Caribbean slaves.
Death is ever present to this day — in these monuments, yes, but also in the centuries-old culture, the music, the historical memory. Death is the spirit that both animates and haunts New Orleans: a gothic gem on a small crescent of the Mississippi River.
But more than 20 years after Hurricane Katrina flooded 80% of my hometown, we must finally confront the mortality of New Orleans itself. This is the sobering conclusion of a new peer-reviewed study in Nature Sustainability.
The study’s findings build on decades of research that consistently determine that low-lying coastal cities — such as Miami, Norfolk, Charleston, and especially New Orleans — face an existential threat from climate change. As a New Orleans native and an urbanist whose work focuses on helping American cities thrive amid economic, technological, and environmental challenges, I see an urgent call in this body of work, a call for a reckoning of Herculean proportions.
For those of us concerned with New Orleans’s survival and that of vulnerable communities like it, we must finally acknowledge a startling reality: New Orleans can only be saved if it first accepts that it might not be.
Led by a multi-institutional team of scholars, including some from Tulane, the study analyzed the effects of sea-level rise on the Gulf Coast — America’s “canary in the coal mine” for climate change, as the researchers note. Louisiana has lost a landmass the size of Delaware — 2,000 square miles — to coastal erosion in the last century. And matters are worsening. The issue is not whether Louisiana’s coastline will keep moving inland — the study projects it will migrate further inward as much as 62 miles — but how we address it. By 2070, researchers anticipate 75% of the region’s remaining coastal wetlands will be gone, and that the Gulf of Mexico may surround the city before the century’s end.
“Coastal Louisiana has evidently already crossed the point of no return,” the researchers conclude. We have a few generations to prepare for a transition north; the study recommends that we begin relocation-planning immediately.
Accepting mortality is not surrendering. Seeing the future clearly need not become a self-fulfilling prophecy that accelerates decline — it can become the catalyst for the action that prevents it. New Orleans needs the courage to be mortal.
This reckoning will require New Orleanians to jettison the myths we have constructed about ourselves and our home. In the “City That Care Forgot,” we advertise that the good times can roll forever. Entrenched racial inequalities are masked by a public brand of libertine fun and rich, multi-cultural food. Jazz and the roar of parades muffle the alarm bells of a looming environmental crisis.
The tourism industry provides a relatively high floor for stability, but the economy historically hasn’t been diverse or strong, and the city has steadily lost population since the 1970s. When it comes to facing its own death, New Orleans and many of my compatriots have long embraced denial or self-rationalization.
Living in New Orleans requires a certain suspension of disbelief — that impending doom is out of sight enough to live a carefree life, and that any danger only lends the city a romantic allure. My childhood home was a half mile from the Algiers levee. Katrina struck when I was in college and spun a tornado that wrecked my house. The hurricane and its chaotic aftermath awakened many to the city’s underlying weaknesses and swept me into a career as an urbanist.
Looking back, I’ve realized that Katrina taught us the wrong lesson: we mistook resilience for invincibility. Most of my family remain in southeastern Louisiana, many vowing to never leave. I deeply love New Orleans, which is why this latest diagnosis is so painful and why climate politics are so frustrating.
New Orleans has become a symbol for America’s inability to solve big challenges. While city leaders aren’t climate deniers, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, a Republican,called climate change a “hoax.” Last year, he canceled the $3 billion Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project, the state’s last serious effort to rebuild wetlands.
The study’s scientists were unsparing about that decision’s consequences: The cancellation “effectively means giving up on extensive portions of coastal Louisiana, including the New Orleans area.” Like Cassandra, the scientists speak truth to those who will not hear it. Whistling past the graveyard, time and again, is what too many politicians choose over tackling climate change. This is not fate; it is a tragedy largely of our own making. A maddening form of suicide.
We know humans are mortal, but we forget that cities are, too. The ancients learned this when the Greeks sacked Troy, Mt. Vesuvius buried Pompeii under lava, and the Mediterranean swallowed the Egyptian port city Heracleion. It’s hubris to think we’re different. All cities can die — through sudden shocks or grinding stresses. In 2016, the U.S. federal government gave $48 million in relocation support to Isle de Jean Charles — a Native American community two hours from New Orleans on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast where residents were advised to leave their homes because coastal erosion had consumed 98% of the island.
America’s earliest climate refugees, they will not be the last.
New Orleans now occupies an uneasy liminal space — not yet dead, but unable to live as though it will be here forever, compelled to more forcefully balance solving immediate needs with planning for what could be a grim future. That will require radical honesty about the science, the threats, and what it will take to persevere.
Only by coming to terms with the city’s mortality can we fight for its future. Such fraught times are typically transitory, but liminality, where death and life blend in the context of climate peril, now defines the city’s remaining days. Its residents and the many who love it must acknowledge that and lean into this battle with new resolve.
To avoid becoming a zombie city, that danger between death and life demands we launch a project of urban metamorphosis — involving a new kind of civic leadership, decision-making process, and investment strategy — to reimagine what New Orleans can become. What would saving the city even as we lose it look like?
With enough time and planning we may be able to preserve New Orleans’s soul — its cultural, architectural, and historical essence — while rebuilding the physical community on safer ground.
Rather than reliving the catastrophe of Katrina, with dead bodies in attics, we can plan and act deliberately. We can shift the city’s center of gravity inland over time, redrawing its borders while trying to maintain what makes our neighborhoods special, with their iconic shotgun houses and huge oak trees. New Orleans should continue to invest in resilient industries that strengthen its economy, safeguard its countless cultural treasures, build adaptive infrastructure in places it can protect long-term, and develop a phased plan to move people out of harm’s way. None of this will be possible without state and federal partnership, so it is vital we hold elected leaders at every level accountable.
We can start by educating civic leaders and their constituents about what is unavoidable and what is still possible. New Orleans would not be the first city to engage in what is called a “managed retreat.” There are a handful of examples around the world, and that number is only going to grow. In addition to Isle de Jean Charles, the city of Grand Forks, in British Columbia, Canada, is moving a whole neighborhood — nearly 100 properties — rather than try to fight future flooding disasters. With Jakarta inexorably sinking into the Java Sea, Indonesia is abandoning its political capital for a purpose-built metropolis on the island of Borneo. The Swedish town of Kiruna, situated 90 miles north of the Arctic Circle, is probably the clearest example of managed retreat, relocating people and buildings nearly two miles east by 2035. While it’s not moving because of climate change — the culprit is a sprawling mine causing the town to sink — it shows what New Orleans should aim to do.
But managed retreat is neither simple nor clean. A decade after Isle de Jean Charles relocated to higher ground, many residents are bitter. New homes leaked, promises went unkept, and residents had little say in how federal money was spent. They mourn the loss of their community and decry the government’s ineffectiveness at building a new one. New Orleans must learn from that experience and center people, not bureaucracies, in the relocation process, while never underestimating the trauma residents are sure to endure.
For my hometown, this will be a decades-long journey — daunting and expensive, with unfathomable consequences for the region and nation. Its actual feasibility is uncertain; however, the cost of inaction is all too clear.
Loving a place means telling the truth about it — and the real question is not when the end will come, but whether we spend the years ahead in denial or in purposeful action. Tears well up when I think about what will be lost even with careful planning. But we can harness this grief, for there is time yet to write a new chapter in the epic history of New Orleans — if we summon heroic hearts and act together. The alternative is to slowly drown.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Nicholas Lalla is an urbanist and the author of Reinventing the Heartland(HarperCollins, 2025)
