annouon this episode of "earth focus," lessons learned during hurricane katrina are being put to the test along the coast of louisiana. some predict new orleal be submerged by the end of this century. the region's survival depends on its ability to adapt to climatehange. if successful, louisiana may provide a blueprint for others around the world. [film advance clicking]

tucker: there were families here. there were kids in the street playing football, right? there were neighbors. this house was the candy lady. as d kids, we would con and spend our quarters and tht here on this porch and eat it and just enjoy atmosphere of the community, right, and that went ay just overnight. it just got washed away. [helicopter whirring] man: we are seeing scenes like this one throughout the city. lieberman: do you remember if you told them that the levees had broken? brown: i don't recall specifically, buit was that new orleans is flooding.

walts: no. sit. knocked over them plants on their porch la night, huh? miss is some upset with you. a couple of mths ago, we had a rain storm, just a ordinary rainstorm in southeast louisiana. it was one of those days that we thought, "hey, just a little rain," but low and behold, the city flooded. the drainage system was not up to par. tucker: we loved hurricanes as kids. i remember when the calm came, we would play t in the water. it was just another day off from school, right, but now it's terrifying. it's terrifying.

walters: this is not a hoax. this is real. climate change is real, so how do we live with it? i think in this section of town, we're starting to understand that wer and climate change goes hand in hand.h on: new orleans in the last 5 to 7 years hareally taken on a great adaption of climate resilience and climate change. elevation is one of the major adaptations that you sometimes see, is that the houses are raigher. this is the center for the sustainable engagementnd development. we have rain gardens here. we help racommunities how to buil gardens. we also have a orchard. you see over here, we here. after katrina, you had all these toxins from the water, so

that weo the soil, and that's all over the lower ninth ward and probably a lot in louisiana. evidently, the process of going through the trees to bear fruit, it doe't come into the fruit. also, we recommend abd gardens where you can put fresh soil to give you crops that are not tainted with that point. what we've tried to do is help with the community to first educate them because they get confused about, you know, is climate change a political issue. is it real? we just try to gi try to show how they can be advocates for how we adapt to that climate tucker: if we don't do something, all this beauty of new orleans that everybody loves, tourists co down to see, they'll beooking at just wate that's it.

williams: the plan we've relied on b water, and if you've ever been to a beach when there's a riptide and you think you can fight water, you will learn that you will lose that battle. waggoner: with a climate adaptation planyou have a wet system and a dry system, so when you need to lift watera out, youdo that, but when you need to let the water in, you can let the water in through that system into these canals and circulate it around the city. willlems: i mean, some peop might walk past here and think, "oh, yeah. it's just overgrown grass." no. it's a low-lyinge that has certain vegetation in it that is the perfecvegetation when you want water to absorb and be able to dissipate at a more gr'ual rate. i mean, it do't look like a lot of natural

science, but there's a lot of natural scient goes into it. waggoner: costs less to havein greeastructure because this is low-maintenance. this is a model of a part of tht as the main drainage basin. you have an underground system, the white nes under the earth. the idea was to get the water into these pipes, to get that water to these pumps and push it out. that was the method. williams: truth ofhe matter is, there is no way to solve our water issues with just our pumps and turbines. it's not enough. it will never be ough. waggoner: you know, decades of doing the wrong thing usually warning in 2005. williams: if there was a political o make sure that this city sees another 300 years, it woun having very beautiful, very aesthetic blueways along with greenways

throughout the city, us living with water, so that when that next storm comes, because it's going to come--that's a fact-- that water has a place to go other than your cars and your homes and the street. [film advance clicks] reed: at some point a hurricane katrina, people started to get really serious about al issues, and they started to think about risk reduction, ptecting people from flooding, together with restoration as one thing that needs to be addressed, ando we came up with this coastal master plan which is a list of projects that have been scientifically vetted, and so we have projects that dredge maal from one place and put it in another place to actually build new marshes where there's open water amoment. on the risk-reduction side, we have xtensive series of

levees and floodgates around some critical coastal communities. these are projects that we think will work, not work no but work into the future. man: this is skylane 5478 november. kolker: state's coastal master plan is a $50 billion, 50-year plan. i consider myself an oceanographer and a coastal geologist, so i look at issues like why we sink in louisiana, how we rebuild coastal landscape. thbarrier islands are one of the first lineof defense against a storm, right, so notice how this is now pretty much c channels in the middle of it. this is an example of a restored barrier island. l right. then you can see new orleans, so that's oneof

he major post-katrina levee improvements, so the idea was to basically to wall off this area to prevent a storm surge from getting to the lower ninth rd. levees are sometimes built with earth, and sometes they're built with concrete, but the core point is that they are all a wall that pcts an area from waves and rising waters from a storm. the biggest varin this is sea level rise. if the seal level rise rates are at the low end of the spectrum of what people predict, then you could rebuild large areas of the landscape and provide flood protection for a lot of p if rates are at the high end, then i o think a lareas will be lost, even with the state's best efforts.

all right. well, welcome to cocodrie. the master plan needs a lot of input, and so the kind of work that i do feeds into the parameters that the state needs as part of its master pl so, you know, i just wanted to give you a view of what the salt marshes around here look like. you can see that there's marsh for miles in that direction. marshes provide a lot of bufr from storm energy, so they're a buffer between our human civilization and the sea, so the restoration involves pumping sediment into a marsh like this to raise the elevation to allow it to better keep pth sea level rise and to fill in areas that have eroded. so this is the bubba dove structure, which is one of the major floodgates in the morganza to the gulf levee

system. with a levee, one question that you have is who's i the levee system. by drawingis all in the marsh, you're changing the environment, but you're also setting down a series of principles of whoiv where and the kinds of choices that these communities face in the years ahead, some of which are going to be very, very tough choices. na albert pquin: this area

used to be lover's lane because there was trees l over the place. you could get in here and go hide back there, so we'd h listen to musicang out with your girlfriend. y'all don't mind if i say that, huh? all right. i was born and raised right here, in the tall grass right here. i guess it represent where all of my ancestors was born and raised and died, and a lot is buried over here, as well, so to me, it means a whole bunch.an comardelle: theis important to us because it's where our ancestors settled. that's where are families are. that's where the heart of who we arth is. it's a spac we beome one with. albert p. naquin: the indians were in the way of the white man, so they all signed treaties for more land and mor

land, and that's how we got to over here. the government chased us, so we settled over here and was happy,ow mother nature is getting us away. brunet: this is my grandparen on my mother's side, my grandmother and my grandfather right there. i was raised here my whole life. yes. isle de jean charles has always been a wonderful place to live. the island didn't actually open up to the world fully, not until about the earties when our road was built. it was very easy to wake up in the morning and see armadillo in the yard or opossum or a raccoon, you ow, crossing the yard or whatever, whatnot. all that has changed because, with a lot of it just being water now,

the trees have died off. what you're seeing is actually just a sn of what it used to be, you know? albert p. naquin: to me, it means almost, i guess you can say, like a family member having cancer, you know? it's being eaten away, you know, where it's just a little bit by little bit getting destroyed. now, the only thing is, the piece of land is lasting longer than the human body can.

the one right here is an oil field canal. the's one that passes here. there's one that passes a bit further, and there'e that passes in the back, so you're looking attw water or ser intrusion coming from the pipeline canals, and they destroy the vegetation that we used to have... but, you know, most of the peopleork for the oil companies. they're the one that's putting food and paying the rent and mortgages and stuff like that, so, as much as you hate them, you have to like them. dupre: isle de jean charles is-- what's canary in the mine field. we're seeing--over here, we call it relative sea level rise. you have the global sea level rise,

which is slight, but about 80% of the seaevel rise here is because of subsidence, so we both s global sea level rise at theso same time,e are sinking by, i think it's 3 millimeters a year. it doesn't sound like much, but you go into 40 years, 50 years, d you start to notice differences when you're already only slightly above the water like isle de jean charles. brunet: in the beginng, it was a slow process. it was really not really noticeable, but then whenever the water startedre coming in even ith it, it got to be more rapid because they had more water coming in and the land didn't stand a chance, so many people on their own did make the decision to go ecause of the water.

dena naquin: my dad moved off the island, i want to say, right before i was born because he 't able to get to work with the road flooding and he needed to work, biloxi-chitimacha-choctaw band of isle de jean charles, and that's my heritage, that is my daughter's heritage. you know, that's our family legacy.er al p. naquin: yaah! [laughter] get all the people who will be named. hurry up, farmer boy. a child was born, everybody went and visit and brought a gift. now it's not happening. thank yor today's sunrise. aiden, you want a indian name?

yes. your name is little fox. the displacement really, really made a change in our culture. now we kind of live-- ha a ha!--like there are no indians, ok? dupre: the only way these survive into the later 21st century is to protect ourselves from the gulf of mexico. i realize in 300 years, this will probably be all open water. i mean, the sea will take us all over. what i'm trying to do with levee system, what i'm trying to do, is buy ourselves two or 3 generations. it's just about impossible to include them into a leveeco system. it woul probably

$300 million, and it would be nearly impossible because the salt condions are so bad. you know, to build a flood-protection project, you have to have more benefits than cost. one thing that's not factored in the cost, they only look at the cost of the homes, the cost of the businesses, the w,frastructure, but, you k don't know how you put a price on it, but they do not consider the cost of a whole culture. [film advance clicks] [tom-tom playing] comardelle: as displacement kee happening and we just further separate our community, it'll just get lost. [men chanting]

man: turn to the left. comardelle: we learned about a national disaster resilience plan competition, so we submitted our plans. we worked to fit with the state's master plan, and they presented it, and got funded. sanders: right now, the way relocations typically happen in united states, we rely on an individual buy-out model, and ono, in other words, so receives some compensation to go live somewhere else, t in doing so, we do lose that cultural fabric, so we don't really know if we can move people collectively as a group

cheaper and more efficiently than individuals. comardelle: there's very little positive in the form of resettlement of ople. you know, governments just don't do it well. we presented a different model, community-designed, community-driven. i think that was, hud looked on that and said, "let's try it. let's try a pilot program, see if we can figure out how to do this on a smaller scale so we can change it for--" we have so many communities in the u.s. and abroad that's facing these same climate issues, and i think that's why so manype ple are watching, because it's like, "ok. can we really get this ght?" because we know how important it is for the future of the world to get it right. brunet: there's a reality tre that i don't like, but it's something that i have to fa up to because, you see, i had to go there and make a decision to

leave beplace that's alway home for 7 or 8 generations, and that wasn't easy to let go of, and, in fact, in spite of answering that questn a few times, it still doesn't make it easy. [film advance clicks] comardelle: so this is the new preferred site for the island. this is where our commuty is gonna move to. it's a beautiful place. to me, this is new life, new birth, a sustainable place. this is a healthy space. sanders: now, we do understandis that s a historically tribal community, and we also understand that populations have left this particular location over a period of time, and those folks who are

successful in this project will have an opportunity to reconstitute in the new location, but our primary set of beneficiaries are the people living on the island. we want to pick up the peopl are living in this dire scenario and ensure that they live somewhere that is safe now and into the future. comarlle: i hope that the tribe would own the land, and actually, we sort of like a mixed ownership. you know, theks foould have full rights to their land, but at the same time, if they were to go and want to move off of it, it would revert back to the tribe so that way, that land will bforever sacred for the tribe to have. sanders: we've gwalk a pretty fine line by which we're developing something that makes sense for this commity but also could be applicable to a much wider array of communities that may be in a similar situation. we simply don't have a good answthat question yet. comardelle: i find this vy empowering. it's allowing us to break down some ofhose

cultural barriers, some of those grief barriers that's been in place from years past. you didn't even realize it. if every other hurricane season, you're having to replace cars or furniture, you don't have a chance have savings, and you don't have a chance to allow your kids to have a better next step in life. startg out in this piece of property, they can have a home and a way to progress into the future. if i was to portray it on ange endand species list, this is our rebirth where we can start our new population to get off that endangerespecies list.

announcer: "earth focus" is made possible in part by the orange county community undation and the farvue foundation. ev

: at the anne frank house, visitors lea j the story of eigs who, in 1942,

went into hiding. they went behind this secret swinging bookcase, into the attic above a shop, and hid almost silentl. among them was 13-year old anne, whose journal has inspired millio of people. you'll see how anne's father, otto, tracked the progress of the allies after d-day. and pencil lines tracking how anne and her sister were gwing up in hiding. ec anne's room is stillated with photos and magazine clippings showing the idols, dreams, and passions of a3-year-old girl. a small window letting in a splash of the outside world lifted her spirits. thenfateful day, the gestapo came. all eight were deported, sent eas c to concentrationps. only her father survived.

anne died just weeks before the end of the war. her handwritten diary inires visitors, and her book has been translated into 70 languages. visiting the anne frank house humanizes the horror of the hocaust through the story of just one of six million victims.