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Wetlands Could Save Cities--and Money, Too

湿地不仅能保护人类还能替人类省钱

As Houston begins recovery efforts from Hurricane Harvey, a new storm threat—Hurricane Irma—is barreling west towards the Caribbean and Florida. We have few defenses against hurricanes' lashing¹ rains and wind and storm surge—but nature does provide one.

当休斯顿开始努力修复飓风哈维带来的创伤时，一场新的风暴威胁——飓风厄玛向西肆虐加勒比海和佛罗里达。对于飓风带来的“强降雨和强风暴”，我们拥有的防御措施很少，不过大自然却为我们提供了一道防护。

\"Wetlands act in two ways to reduce the impacts of storms. They reduce storm surge by acting² as a wall or a barrier and they act as a sponge by soaking up the waters that come down via rainfall."

“湿地可以通过两种方式来降低风暴的影响。它们能够像防护墙或屏障一样来缓解风暴潮，也能够像海绵一样吸收雨水。

Michael Beck is a coastal³ scientist at The Nature Conservancy and the University of California Santa Cruz. He says as we've paved over swampy⁴ coastlines, we've changed how storm waters flow. Or, for an analogy a little closer to home:

迈克尔·贝克是大自然保护协会和加州圣克鲁斯大学的海岸科学家。他表示，我们在沿海岸线铺设道路的同时也改变了风暴潮水的流向。或者打个比方说，让它们离我们的家园更近了:

"Rain falls on your driveway, it's going to run straight out into the street. Rain falls in your garden it's going to soak into the ground. When you've done that at the scale of whole watersheds⁵, there's nowhere for that water to go when it rains.”

“雨水落到了车道上，然后径直流到大街上。它还会落到花园里，随后渗入地下。当整个流域都变成了这种情况，那么下雨时，雨水便无处可去了。”

But some wetlands do remain. Beck and his colleagues teamed up with the insurance industry, and, using the industry's risk assessment⁶ models, asked: how much more damage would Hurricane Sandy have delivered if all the eastern seaboard's wetlands were gone? And they found that marshy⁷ coastlines saved some $625 million dollars in direct flood damages—or about one percent of Sandy's total cost.

但还有一些湿地依然存在。贝克和他的同事们和保险界进行了合作，利用保险业的风险评估模式做了如下假设：如果东海岸所有的湿地都消失了，那么飓风“桑迪”带来的损失会增加多少？他们发现，沼泽海岸线在对抗直接的洪水破坏方面节省了约6.25亿美元——大约相当于“桑迪”总破坏程度的1%。

The researchers also battered⁸ Ocean County, New Jersey⁹, with thousands of hypothetical storms using flood models. And found that wetlands cut flood damages there by 16 percent, compared to areas of the county where wetlands are gone. The study is in the journal Scientific Reports.

研究人员还在新泽西的海洋县利用洪水模型做了数千次假想的风暴袭击。他们发现与那些湿地已经消失的郡县相比，那里的湿地减少了16%洪水破坏造成的损失。这项研究发表在《科学报告》杂志上。

Next, it's up to local governments and the insurance industry to take notice. "Certainly we hope that we will continue to conserve¹⁰ wetlands in part for their intrinsic beauty and the importance of nature." But he says by putting a price-tag on the economic benefit of wetlands it might change the conversation…about conservation.

接下来，就是地方政府和保险商要注意的了。“我们当然希望，人类将继续为了湿地本身的美和保护自然的重要性而保护湿地。”但是他也表示，为湿地贴上经济效益的价签可能会转变湿地保护交涉的对话方式。