The Louvre Moves Its Treasures as Climate Change Brings More Floods to Parishttps://news.trust.org/item/20210226085732-pyja5
The Paris museum is relocating many artworks not on display to a storage facility in northern France designed to stand up to global warming impacts... When the River Seine that runs through Paris overflowed this month, officials at the Louvre Museum were relieved some of their most valuable items were safely stored in northern France.
The world's largest and most visited museum, with almost 10 million visitors annually, had already transported some 100,000 at risk art pieces to the new Louvre Conservation Center in Lievin, some 190 km north. The reason? Climate change.
"The current floods show once again how necessary it is to protect our art works from flooding," said Jean-Luc Martinez, Director of the Louvre, which owns about 620,000 artworks, only 35,000 of which are on display in the Parisian former palace.
"Soon this flood danger will - once and for all - be behind us," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
With climate change, scientists say heavy rains that cause flooding are set to become more frequent, threatening riverside gems like the Louvre, Notre Dame cathedral and the Musee d'Orsay - home to the world's greatest Impressionist paintings.
The problem is not unique to Paris. Italy built flood barriers to protect Venice's historic city centre after salty sea water damaged St Mark's Basilica, while London's Tate galleries sit on flood-prone sites. [
"We have a lot of museums whose collections will be affected if they are not stored properly," said Mechtild Rossler, director of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, which supports landmark buildings recognised by the U.N. cultural agency.
By mid-2021, Louvre officials hope 250,000 at-risk paintings, sculptures and tapestries - including the Venus de Milo - will be in their new, $120 million home, where they will be safe from floods, heatwaves and other extreme weather.
The Louvre Conservation Center is set to become one of Europe's largest art training and research centres, visited by museum specialists, conservators and academics from around the world, as well as offering art refuge for countries in conflict.
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Money Down the Drain: Flood-Prone Miami to Spend Billions Tackling Sea Level Risehttps://phys.org/news/2021-02-flood-prone-miami-billions-tackling-sea.htmlThe US city of Miami is to invest billions of dollars to tackle its vulnerability to rising sea levels, a reality that already affects the daily lives of residents used to constant flooding.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine-Cava said Friday she will protect communities hardest hit by rising sea levels, which eat away at beaches and leave residents particularly vulnerable to flooding during hurricane season.
"We must continue to focus on restoration, preservation and protection of this sacred space," she told a news conference.
"And so we will be together investing billions of dollars... in our infrastructure so that we can lift this community and others that are so affected by sea level rise," she added.
She cited "adaptation action areas" as a first priority to be studied, which would include raising low-lying roads, and waterproofing and converting southern Florida's widely used septic tanks into sewage systems.
The city of Miami Beach—which is part of Miami-Dade County—invested millions of dollars in raising the level of many of its streets in 2016.
