Moving homes in New Orleans to higher ground within the city limits could lessen the impact of any future floods without inhabitants having to abandon their beloved city altogether.

Without moves to combat the rise in sea level due to climate change, the capacity of hurricanes to flood coastal cities like New Orleans will only grow, say Torbjörn Törnqvist and Douglas Meffert of Tulane University in New Orleans (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo365).

The risk of flood damage to homes could be reduced by shifting the population to higher-lying areas of the city that are currently undeveloped, say …