Crisis Looms For Homes On Coast

MIAMI — Real estate agents looking to sell coastal properties usually focus on one thing: how close the home is to the water’s edge. But buyers are increasingly asking instead how far back it is from the waterline. How many meters above sea level? Is it fortified against storm surges? Does it have emergency power and sump pumps?

Rising sea levels are changing the way people think about waterfront real estate. A warming planet has already forced a number of industries — coal, oil, agriculture and utilities among them — to account for potential future costs of a changed climate. The real estate industry, particularly along the vulnerable coastlines, is slowly awakening to the need to factor in the risks of catastrophic damage from climate change, including that wrought by rising seas and storm- driven flooding.

But many economists say that this reckoning needs to happen much faster and that home buyers urgently need to be better informed. Some analysts say the economic impact of a collapse in the waterfront property market could surpass that of the bursting dot- com and real estate bubbles of 2000 and 2008.

Concerns have taken on a new urgency since the presidential election of Donald J. Trump, who has long been a skeptic of global warming, claiming in 2012 that it was a concept “created by and for the Chinese in order to make U. S. manufacturing noncompetitive.” A real estate developer, Mr. Trump is also the owner of several South Florida properties.

Mr. Trump’s recent selection of Myron Ebell to lead his Environmental Protection Agency transition team intensified these worries. Mr. Ebell has helped lead the charge against the scientific consensus that global warming exists and is caused by people.

In April, Sean Becketti, the chief economist for Freddie Mac, the government- backed mortgage giant, wrote that it is only a matter of time before sea level rise and storm surges force people to leave, ditching their mortgages and potentially trig-