page_title: Boston
section_title: Climate change and sea level rise
hierarchical_section_title: Boston / Environment / Climate change and sea level rise
caption_attribution_description: The Low Elevation Coastal Zone (LECZ) Urban-Rural Population and Land Area Estimates Version 2 dataset provides continent-level and country-level estimates of land area and urban, rural, and total population for 202 statistical areas (countries and other UN recognized territories). Population inputs were derived from Gridded Rural-Urban Mapping Project, Version 1 (GRUMPv1). Elevation data were derived from the Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) 90 meter dataset.
context_page_description: Boston is the capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States, and the 21st most populous city in the United States. The city proper covers 49 square miles with an estimated population of 692,600 in 2019, also making it the most populous city in New England, and is the seat of Suffolk County. The city is the economic and cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston, a metropolitan statistical area home to a census-estimated 4.8 million people in 2016 and ranking as the tenth-largest such area in the country. As a combined statistical area, this wider commuting region is home to some 8.2 million people, making it the sixth most populous in the United States.
  Boston is one of the oldest municipalities in the United States, founded on the Shawmut Peninsula in 1630 by Puritan settlers from the English town of the same name. It was the scene of several key events of the American Revolution, such as the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Bunker Hill, and the Siege of Boston.
context_section_description: The City of Boston has developed a climate action plan covering carbon reduction in buildings, transportation, and energy use. Mayor Thomas Menino commissioned the city's first Climate Action Plan in 2007, with an update released in 2011. Since then, Mayor Marty Walsh has built upon these plans with further updates released in 2014 and 2019. As a coastal city built largely on fill, sea-level rise is of major concern to the city government. The latest version of the climate action plan anticipates between two and seven feet of sea-level rise in Boston by the end of the century. A separate initiative, Resilient Boston Harbor, lays out neighborhood-specific recommendations for coastal resilience.
caption: Population density and elevation above sea level in Greater Boston (2010)
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