New Orleans deserves ambition and investment, not abandonment | Letter

Michael Hecht responds to a study calling for New Orleans residents to be relocated due to rising sea levels

Here in New Orleans, we are not climate deniers. For more than 300 years, New Orleans has defended its unique position, most recently with a $15bn storm wall system that kept the city bone-dry during a category five storm.

That is why it was frustrating to read the Guardian’s unquestioning coverage of a recent Nature Sustainability perspectives paper by Torbjörn Törnqvist and colleagues (‘Point of no return’: New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level, study finds, 4 May). Rather than science, the study is an ideologically driven policy argument dressed in the guise of geological inevitability.