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Drake Bennett writes in the June 6, 2010 Boston Globe about plans to harden Boston's low-lying areas against predicted sea-level rise.

You can read the whole article here:Defending Boston from the sea Below is an excerpt:

"For 400 years the sea has been kind to Boston. Maritime trade fed the city’s early economic rise, and countless cod laid down their lives to feed its inhabitants. With the exception of boatloads of occupying redcoats, the Atlantic hasn’t given the city much to complain about. When the area has flooded — as it did this spring — it hasn’t been because of the mighty Atlantic, but the placid Charles.
But when Boston’s planning visionaries think about the future, increasingly, it’s the sea they’re worried about. Huge swaths of the city are on landfill, just a few feet above sea level, and as ocean levels rise in the coming decades — as most earth scientists project they will — Boston faces the prospect of an ocean that is higher and more dangerous than the one it has long known. So-called 500-year floods — freak meteorological events of extreme destructive power, now expected only twice a millennium — will become 100-year floods, and 100-year floods will become 20-year floods.
The specter of rising seas has long been invoked by environmentalists as a kind of warning, to spur action on climate change. But in recent years, a growing chorus of planners and scientists have begun talking about higher sea levels not as some cautionary scenario, but as a fact of life — one that everyone who lives near the ocean, whatever his views on the climate, needs to prepare for.What does Boston need to do? Architects, city officials, insurers, and engineers have begun to lay the groundworkfor a new version of the city, one prepared to keep pace with rising tides. In the past few years, the conversation has gained momentum, with meetings in City Hall, academic conferences on the topic, and a widely discussed article in the current issue of the journal ArchitectureBoston.

The ideas run the gamut from basic infrastructure fixes — raising the entrances to the city’s subway and highway tunnels, or moving electrical equipment out of downtown basements and onto the roofs — to zoning changes that discourage construction in high-risk areas. And a pair of architects is proposing a megalithic building project that would completely reshape Boston Harbor, using massive sea gates that could swing shut to seal the city off from the most devastating storm surges.

“This isn’t just an environmental issue,” says James W. Hunt III, the city’s chief of environmental and energy services. He ticks off the agencies currently involved in the effort: the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the Mayor’s Office of Homeland Security, the office of Environmental and Energy Services, the transportation department, the public health commission.Boston isn’t the only city trying to figure out how to head off a flooded future. In New York City, one team of architects has proposed lining lower Manhattan with wetlands to absorb the rising waters of New York Harbor. One of the winners of a competition in San Francisco last year was a design for a giant ventilated levee that would maintain different sea levels in different parts of the bay. Planners are looking to places like the Netherlands, Venice, and London, all of which have built mammoth gates — Venice’s is slated for completion next year — to hold back unruly seas. They’re seeing whether some of the lessons that cities have learned by living with regularly flooding rivers can apply. The imperative is to start to think, in a detailed, nuts-and-bolts way, about how to deal with rising seas.

But even as it gathers steam, the effort is running up against the practical obstacles that face any grand building plan. It takes decades to design and construct projects at the massive scale of some of the harbor proposals. At the same time, the threat from the ocean is hugely uncertain, politically controversial, and unlikely to hit us with acute force for decades: a recipe, in other words, for political inertia. In Boston and elsewhere, those pushing for transformative measures to fight rising oceans must contend with human psychology, a force as powerful as the sea."