Triage for Flooding Coasts

Hello
I've noticed a couple of folks have picked up on the Sacramento Delta / San Francisco Bay study Public Policy Institute of California (http://featured.matternetwork.com/2008/9/triage-for-flood-prone-lands.cfm ). I think its important to point out (contrary to the sense in some of the posts here on this web site) that in act this triage recommendation was made by CONSENSUS.
The participants making this tough collective recommendation represented diverse disciplines: civil engineering, climate science, economics, hydrology and biology. They established the boundary between the areas that should be saved and the places that would be abandoned to the waves.

Most of us tend to think that rising sea levels threaten only people who live in distant or obscure places -- places like the Tuvalu Islands in the South Pacific where tidal floods are lapping over crops with increasing frequency, forcing people to evacuate in many places from British East Anglia to the South island of New Zealand.
Low-lying coastal regions facing rising sea levels and costly climate change defences are now having to also consider the question whether the environmental costs of any further barriers are worthwhile. “The environmental consequences of doing so, however, may not be acceptable. Although the most common engineering solution for protecting the ocean coast--pumping sand--would allow us to keep our beaches, levees and bulkheads along sheltered waters would gradually eliminate most of the nation's wetland shorelines. To ensure the long-term survival of coastal wetlands, federal and state environmental agencies should begin to lay the groundwork for a gradual abandonment of coastal lowlands as sea level rises.”
http://epa.gov/climatechange/effects/coastal/slrmaps_cost_of_holding.html