Good morning.

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Recently, my colleagues Somini Sengupta and Chang W. Lee traveled to two very different cities, Manila and San Francisco, with one big thing in common: They’ve been forced to adapt to rising seas. They explored how in this expansive, beautiful and unsettling project.

We asked Somini to write about how the piece came together. Here’s her dispatch:

We’ve all read dire projections of how rising global temperatures are raising sea levels.

I wanted to better understand what that means for people in coastal cities right now. Not in the distant future, but right now. I chose sprawling, fast-growing Metropolitan Manila and the San Francisco Bay Area.

I grew up in California, though very far from the ocean, in the flat, inland suburb of Covina. Like many Californians, I thought living by the ocean would be dreamy, and until recently I had not really give much thought to the risks we have inherited by building right up to the water’s edge. Houses, highways, sewer mains: They’re now at risk. Saving them means building costly walls and barriers — or moving people and property out of harm’s way. Those are hard choices.

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Reporting this story sharpened three lessons for me. First, the hazards of the present are shaped by decisions of the past. According to the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, more than 20,000 households and 13 miles of highway are at risk of permanent inundation with two feet of sea level rise.