AI for coastal resilience: Structural inequities in climate adaptation reveal techno-fix limits amid systemic flood risk
Original framing: “Can AI help coastal cities prepare for rising seas and extreme events?” — Phys.org
Historical records show that coastal cities have repeatedly collapsed due to over-reliance on rigid infrastructure, from the 17th-century Dutch 'dike wars' to the 1970 Bhola cyclone in Bangladesh, which killed 500,000 due to colonial neglect of warning systems. The 1953 North Sea flood revealed how Dutch dikes, once a symbol of progress, failed when combined with land subsidence and storm surges—echoing today’s AI-driven risk models that prioritize short-term prediction over long-term adaptability. These precedents underscore how technological fixes often exacerbate systemic fragility when divorced from ecological and social context.
The AI-driven flood prediction narrative exemplifies how technocratic solutions to climate change often reproduce the very systems that created the crisis: extractive urbanization, racialized vulnerability, and the erasure of indigenous knowledge.
While AI can enhance short-term forecasting, its integration into adaptation planning risks deepening inequities unless paired with decolonial data practices, ecosystem-based resilience, and democratic governance. Historical precedents from the Dutch polders to the Mekong Delta reveal that rigid infrastructure fails when divorced from ecological and social context, yet today’s solutions still privilege silicon over symbiosis. The marginalized voices of Black and Indigenous communities—who bear the brunt of flooding—are systematically excluded from both the data and the decision-making, reinforcing a cycle of vulnerability. True resilience demands not just better models, but a radical reimagining of coastal cities as living systems, where technology serves life rather than property, and where the wisdom of the tides is honored alongside the speed of code.