The reason for celebration was two new large allocations of federal money towards boosting business at New Haven’s ports, and towards protecting the city’s waterfront Long Wharf neighborhood from sea level rise, flooding, and storm surges, all of which are likely to take place more frequently and intensely in the coming decades thanks to manmade climate change. Those two projects are The $63 million New Haven Harbor Navigation Improvement Project, to be funded with money from the recently passed bipartisan federal infrastructure bill, and The $160.3 million New Haven County Coastal Storm Risk Management Project, to be funded with money from Hurricane Ida federal relief funds. Some of the other coastal-resiliency projects to be paid for with these federal funds include a “living shoreline” off of Long Wharf to help with erosion protection. Zinn said these federal investments in protecting waterfront areas like Long Wharf are “visionary” because, “in Connecticut, we’re expected to see up to 20 inches of sea-level rise by 2050. We need to start investing now. We’re not going to be able to build all that infrastructure very quickly in 2050 when the sky is falling. We need to start now.” Zinn estimated that these various projects will take roughly five years to complete.
https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/post_coast_rosa