As a kid growing up at the Jersey Shore, Brian Kempf always had his eye on the water line.
“I would spend summers digging elaborate trenches and walls to keep our beach chairs safe from the incoming tide,” Kempf said. “I lost that battle many times.”
Now, as Atlantic City’s planner, Kempf still builds seawalls, now to hold increasing tides and rising sea-levels at bay while protecting 40,000 residents and scores more tourists.
“People are always going to be drawn to the water,” Kempf told NJ.com in an interview about the uncertain environmental future of the Jersey Shore. “In Atlantic City, our entire livelihood is based on the water and living with it and adjusting to it as need be.”
In New Jersey, rising oceans are reshaping the coastal landscape. Entire communities and large swaths of coastal land could be completely underwater by 2100, and others could suffer debilitating tidal flooding twice a day, researchers say.
NJ.com compiled data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to create a tool that shows how the changing sea levels could impact towns near the ocean and other bodies of water across the state.
The data paints a bleak picture of the potential consequences of sea-levels rising higher and higher, and raises serious questions about the sustainability of living along the state’s sandy shores.
Sections of Cape May and Atlantic City could be underwater in the next 75 years if sea levels reach scientists’ worst fears. And roads and bridges in towns along the Delaware River could vanish.
In the next 25 years, coastal inundation will flood roads and bridges, and limit access to certain places twice a day, experts say. The only question is how severe that flooding will be.
“If sea-level rise continues at the current pace, most if not all coastal communities will be impacted on a daily basis,” said Jonathan Delura, a senior research specialist at the Center for Urban Policy Research in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers. “This doesn’t account for major weather events that produce storm surges or major flooding.”
New Jersey suffers from one of the fastest rates of sea level rise along the Atlantic coast due to subsidence – the sinking or settling of land – according to NOAA.
DeLura’s latest analysis shows the impacts of flooded roadways if sea-levels continue increasing at their current pace over the next 25-75 years. Roads and bridges along New Jersey’s coastal communities could be inundated at high tide on a regular basis, DeLura found, something he warns city planners should seriously consider as they tackle infrastructure improvements.
“We all want Atlantic City and the Jersey Shore to be viable places to live, work and play for as long as possible,” Kempf added. ” And I think to that extent we can’t afford to be overly optimistic about how high the water will go, because it will go high.”
“We need to ensure that the city is here for future generations,” Kempf said, noting, “that does not mean packing up and moving inland, fracturing our community and uprooting people’s livelihoods to where they continue to face different kinds of hazard risks someplace else.”
Will this actually happen?
There are a lot of unknowns in projections like DeLura’s, and factors like the future rate of global warming and local infrastructure policies will help determine the actual impacts. Finding consensus among climate scientists on just how severe sea-level rise will be is difficult.
But increasing carbon emissions and temperature changes are melting ice and expanding the sizes of our oceans, NOAA says. A United Nations climate report published Tuesday acknowledged that global warming would surpass a critical benchmark in the next five years and policy efforts should switch from prevention to damage control.
The current rate of sea level rise in Atlantic City is about .17 inches per year or about 1.7 feet per century, but that pace is expected to accelerate, according to NOAA data.
In 2022, NOAA reported that ocean levels along the New Jersey coast were 1.7 feet higher than in 2000. NOAA anticipates that Atlantic City could see 2 feet of sea level rise by 2100 on the low end and a staggering 7 feet at the high end, if oceans continue to rise at the current pace.
If oceans rise a modest 2.5 feet, large sections of Cape May, Cape May Point, Wildwood, Stone Harbor and Avalon – especially along the back bay areas – would be underwater at high tide, NOAA data shows. The north end of Brigantine and a long stretch of Long Beach Island would also be underwater, and the ripple effects would be felt all the way to Sandy Hook, up Raritan Bay and into the Hudson River.
At 5 feet, tiny slivers of New Jersey’s barrier islands would be left and by 7.5 feet they would be almost completely gone at high tide.
Further north in Monmouth County, large areas along tidal tributaries to Raritan Bay would be underwater from Middle Township to Long Branch.
Areas along the Hudson River like Jersey City, Hoboken and Weehawken will face even more flooding issues as sea levels increase.
DeLura’s analysis – which he says liberally defines flooding as any water touching a bridge or road – found that by 2050 with 2 feet of estimated sea-level rise, about 70 miles of roadway would be flooded in Ocean County during the average high tide. In Cape May County, more than 53 miles of roads would be flooded.
By 2100, if sea levels increase by 4 feet, more than 170 miles of roads in Atlantic County, 216 miles in Cape May County and 404 miles in Ocean County would be flooded at high tide.
Almost 12% – more than 19 miles – of hurricane evacuation routes in Cape May County would be inundated under this scenario, according to DeLura’s report. And similar scenarios would play out in some of Atlantic City’s poorest neighborhoods over the same period.
Read the full article on NJ.com, September 3, 2026
View/Download the Report by Jonathan Delura, Senior Research Specialist, Center for Urban Policy Research for the New Jersey Climate Change Research Center.