Cutting emissions would go some way to protecting us, but even in the best case scenario, we will still have to deal with additional sea level rise. And emissions are not currently following the best case scenario, but there are measures we can take to protect ourselves from rising seas.

For one, you could protect the areas where threatened people live by, building defences like sea walls, widening beaches, or enhancing natural protections like mangroves. And where possible, people have already started moving their homes and businesses for the inland.

But given the scale of the problem, building defences and relocating people can only achieve so much. It is also that realisation that you can't do that everywhere. So there is a scary point of- if we can't do things, what happens next ?

Well what if, instead of protecting the world's cost from rising seas, we could find a way to fix the problem at the source? 

Given just how radical the problem is, some scientist have suggested a radical solution: the hope that we could hold the world's ice sheets back, stopping them from rising the seas. This is an example of ‘target geoengineering’. The hope is that tackling ice loss at the source could be both easier to achieve, while only having local side effects. 

Ice sheets are flowing into the ocean through certain channels and so it would be a matter of finding a way to plug these outlets. But these channels can still be kilometres wide - and how do you plug something so massive?

But it's clear that more fossil fuels we burn, and the hotter the planet gets, the more unstable the world's ice sheets will become. That is because even though the seas would keep rising after we stop burning fossil fuels, how much they rise in total depends on how much we burned in total. And stopping burning fossil fuels wouldn't just help protect the ice sheets, it would also limit other sources of sea level rise. 

We absolutely need to take very serious measures prevent what might be the end of our civilization. And however we choose to cut our emissions, adapt coastlines across the globe, or even attempt to hold back our ice sheets, it is clear that there is no time to wait. What we do now really determines the future that we see by the end of the century.