Climate Adaptation
The Flood That Was Sent Somewhere Else
Levee wars, maladaptation, and who stands on the unprotected side of the wall.
In the spring of 1927, as the Mississippi River rose towards the worst flood in American history, men stood on the levees at night with guns, watching the far bank more closely than the water.
Everyone on that river understood the same piece of hydrology. If the levee broke on the other side, the water would pour into your neighbour’s fields and fall away from yours. Your protection was his ruin, and his protection was yours. So communities guarded their earthen walls against other communities, and John Barry, who wrote the history of that flood, records “at least a dozen people killed in separate gun battles in 1927 over attempts to sabotage the levee.”
Those men understood something plainly that we have since buried in softer language. A wall does not make flood water disappear. It sends the water somewhere else, and somebody decides where.
Part I: Somebody Chose Whose Flood It Would Be
The levee wars did not stay between farmers. On 29 April 1927, with the river threatening New Orleans, the authorities dynamited the levee at Caernarvon, downstream of the city, to relieve the pressure. The breach flooded the parishes of Plaquemines and St. Bernard and displaced nearly ten thousand people, mostly trappers, fishermen and smallholders. The state and the city had pledged to compensate anyone who suffered damage as a result. More than $35 million in claims were filed. The amount paid was reduced to $2.9 million, and most of that went to a single land and fur company, while many displaced families were left with almost nothing and some with nothing at all.
New Orleans stayed dry, but the rescue story does not hold. Shortly afterwards the Glasscock levee broke on the river’s west bank, relieving the pressure anyway, and it is largely believed that the city’s levees would have held without the Caernarvon breach at all. Two parishes were flooded for a sacrifice that was probably never needed, and the decision was public, lawful and signed at the highest levels. Stripped of its paperwork, it was the same decision the men with shotguns had been guarding against: this flood will happen to you so that it does not happen to us. The city simply had what the farmers did not, the authority to make the transfer legal and the power to make the promise of compensation and then shrink it.
Part II: The Word We Invented for It
Climate policy now has a name for protection that behaves this way. The IPCC defines maladaptation as actions that “may lead to increased risk of adverse climate-related outcomes, including via increased greenhouse gas emissions, increased or shifted vulnerability to climate change, more inequitable outcomes, or diminished welfare, now or in the future,” adding that most often it is an unintended consequence.
The definition does not say the project failed. A seawall can be maladaptive precisely because it works locally. The people behind it stay dry, the investment is protected, the ribbon is cut, and the evidence of local success is real. Some harm has genuinely been prevented; other risk has been shifted to another place, another community, or another decade. That is what makes maladaptation so difficult to argue against. You are not pointing at a wall that fell down. You are pointing at a wall that worked, and asking about the people it worked against.
Part III: No Saboteurs Required
The modern version does not need saboteurs in boats. Just before ten o’clock on the night of 2 May 2011, the US Army Corps of Engineers itself breached the Birds Point levee in Missouri, deliberately flooding a 130,000-acre floodway of farmland to save the small town of Cairo, Illinois, from a catastrophic levee failure. Within hours the Ohio River at Cairo had fallen more than half a foot. Missouri fought the decision all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost. It was the first time the floodway had been used since 1937.
I am not arguing the Corps was wrong. Flooding farmland to save a town is defensible, and unlike 1927 the floodway families were operating under easements they had long known about, and Missouri had its day in court. What strikes me is how completely the choice had been absorbed into procedure. In 1927 the transfer of a flood from one community to another required dynamite, armed men and an emergency decree. By 2011 the dynamite remained, but it had entered the operations manual. The allocation was the same, one place flooded to spare another. What changed was the machinery around the choice, and readers of this letter series will recognise where hard choices go to stop looking like choices.
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There is a second, quieter transfer that levees can perform, and geographers have documented it since Gilbert White’s work in the 1940s: protection invites development. Build a levee and the land behind it fills with homes and capital, precisely because it now feels safe, so when the wall is finally overtopped, the losses are far larger than the flood it was built to prevent. A levee can move risk across a floodplain, and it can also move risk into the future, where it accumulates. The discount rate in last week’s letter made future harm look small on paper. The levee builds it up in the ground while making it look absent.
Part IV: The Wall on My Own Coastline
I did not learn any of this from the Mississippi. I learned it standing on beaches in Lagos.
The Great Wall of Lagos is an eight-kilometre sea defence protecting Eko Atlantic City, the new financial district rising on land reclaimed from the ocean off Victoria Island. As engineering, it is impressive, and for the coastline directly behind it, it works. But a 2012 coastal modelling study of the project stated its central finding plainly: the construction “will not change the total erosion volumes downstream of the inlet. However, as the revetment of the project retains the coast, the erosion will be shifted towards downstream.” Downdrift of the project, the study found, erosion rates are locally relatively high.
The study’s authors wrote that before the wall was finished. The erosion does not stop. It moves. The study does not prove that every house lost farther east fell to Eko Atlantic; erosion on the Lagos coast predates the project and has more than one cause. What it establishes is that holding one stretch of coastline in place shifts part of the erosion pressure down the coast. And east of the wall, on the coastline where I have sat with fishing communities during our research work, that pressure is not a modelling output. It is the thing that took the front row of houses, and then the next one. The community members I spoke with told me they were not part of any meeting where that protection was designed. Caernarvon is how to read their position: they live beyond the boundary of somebody else’s protection, holding whatever the compensation turns out to be, which no one has yet defined.
The wall did not create the Atlantic’s appetite, and Lagos genuinely needs coastal defence. The question maladaptation forces is never whether to protect. It is why the map of protection so reliably matches the map of money, and why the communities on the unprotected side find out what was decided by watching the water arrive.
Part V: What to Ask Before the Next Wall
Some transfers are unavoidable. When a city will otherwise drown, the water has to go somewhere, and someone has to decide where. The question is never whether a transfer happened. It is whether it was named in advance, agreed to by the people who would carry it, and backed by a remedy they could actually claim.
By that test the three cases are not the same. Birds Point came closest: easements known for decades, a published rule, and a court that heard the objection and answered it. Caernarvon was the opposite: an emergency decree, a promise, and then a payment shrunk to a twelfth of what was claimed. Eko Atlantic sits between them, with a model that knew where the erosion would go and communities who were not in the room when it was read.
Adaptation money reaches coastlines like ours late, in smaller amounts than promised, and often as loans. When it finally arrives, much of it is poured into concrete. The standard safeguards will all be present: an impact assessment, a consultation plan, a compensation framework. Every story in this letter had some version of those, and the flood still moved.
So follow the harm, not the ribbon, and ask the questions the paperwork does not ask of itself:
Ask whose damage was discounted: The avoided losses behind the wall and the induced losses downdrift are both future numbers, and somebody applied a rate to them. Ask whether the downdrift damages were in the cost-benefit model at all, and at what rate, because a wall can be made to look efficient simply by discounting the people east of it.
Ask whether the consultation map matches the erosion map: The engineering model knows exactly where the harm goes; the stakeholder plan is usually drawn around the construction site. Lay the two maps side by side. The communities inside the model’s erosion zone and outside the consultation list are the project’s Caernarvon.
Ask where the transferred risk now sits: If the model says erosion shifts east, someone has acquired a liability. If no document names who, the project has booked its benefit and left its cost as an unfunded public promise, which is exactly what the 1927 compensation pledge turned out to be.
Ask who has standing when the prediction comes true: Monitoring is only evidence. The question is whether a named party owes a named remedy to the people in the monitored zone, enforceable by them, before the first stone is laid. If nobody owes anything, the monitoring will simply document the transfer in high resolution.
None of this requires opposing protection. It requires refusing to let “the wall works” end the conversation, because the wall always works for someone, and the whole question is who.
The Other Bank
The men guarding the levees in 1927 had no theory of maladaptation and no adaptation finance. They had a river, a wall, and the clarity of people who knew that protection is allocation: the flood was coming, and the only real decision was whose it would be. A century later we make the same decision with better instruments and softer words, in operations manuals and morphological models, and the clarity has gone, though the water has not. Ask of any wall not whether it works, but who stands on the other bank of it, and whether anyone told them what the model already knows.
Originally published at https://abimbolaabikoye.com on September 21, 2026.
