“Everything is going against us,” says Adam Fenech, the climate scientist of Prince Edward Island.

Most islands, Fenech says, have a base of granite or another hard rock. “We don’t have that here,” he says.

Bit by bit, Prince Edward Island, made of sandstone and sand, is slowly washing into the sea and “everybody knows it,” Fenech says.

As director of the University of PEI Climate Lab, Fenech gives speeches about erosion all over the island. Today, he sits in a homestyle restaurant called Our Family Traditions, with salt fish and deep-fried clams on the menu. Fenech drinks coffee.

Erosion is natural. Historical. What’s different now, he says, is the ocean. Water levels are rising. So are ocean temperatures. Their extra heat can add fuel to storms, creating powerful, surging waves that smash against the coast and rip it away.

Winter ice used to appear on the coast in late November and spend the winter as a buffer for the shoreline. The sea ice came this year, Fenech says, but over the previous few winters it was hard to find. It used to form along the beaches or the base of soaring red cliffs, growing thick, extending into the ocean so that when a storm came the ice took the brunt of its energy, not the sandstone.

Fenech says P.E.I is losing an average of 28 centimetres of land every year. That shoreline often falls off in large chunks in vulnerable locations. There have been some areas where land actually increased, due to shifting sands, but the dominant theme is loss.

The UPEI Climate Lab examined infrastructure at risk of damage, or disappearing, due to erosion over the next 90 years. It found 1,000 existing homes, eight barns, seven gazebos, 42 garages, 17 lighthouses, 146 commercial buildings, 50 kilometres of roads and one wind turbine were vulnerable.