LAST week officials in Monroe County, Florida, announced plans to spend £1.3 billion in the next 25 years to raise 150 miles of roads, adding more drains, pump stations and vegetation to absorb the seawater, though they did not yet know where this money was coming from. What was clear was that not every home would be saved – this was the beginning of a climate migration.

“The water is coming and we can’t stop it,” said Michelle Coldiron, the local mayor. “Some homes will have to be elevated, some will have to be bought out. It’s very difficult to have these conversations with homeowners.”

Florida Keys may seem a different world from Scotland. Here, we might think, there is no equivalent to this coral cay archipelago. But we are connected to Florida through global sea level rise. Anyone looking at the much-shared recent map of the UK by Climate Central predicting the sea level rise related spread of flood risk areas, by 2050, will know that here too there areas and towns, neighbourhoods where people already live, set to be swamped.

We will see flooding too, unless some serious preventative engineering is put in place. It might not be on the same level as current Bangladesh, or Indonesia, which already has plans to shift its capital from sinking Jakarta to Borneo. It might not even be as bad as the predicted swamping of the English fens. But Scotland will see its rise.

What’s shocking is that these are not the first such flood prediction maps that have been produced – I have seen such maps before. Yet still in Scotland and the rest of the UK we continue to build new developments on at-risk land.

Research has shown that one in 10 of all new homes in England since 2013 have been built on land at the highest risk of flooding. I can’t find the equivalent figures for Scotland, but I have seen the Climate Central maps and know that even in my own area of Edinburgh, where the city meets the Firth of Forth, developments are still in the planning in areas of predicted flooding. The Climate Central map suggests the city could lose the Hydro and Glasgow Airport as well as huge swathes of land near the Clyde to flooding in just 30 years.

The areas of Scotland that could be underwater by 2050

This is an issue that all countries with inhabited coastlines will be forced to look at in some way – some, of course, more than others. A draft UN Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change report leaked last week, included a worst-case-scenario calculation of damages between £1.2 and 2.3 trillion by 2050 for the world’s 136 largest coastal cities. Entire cities, it predicted – including New York City, Mumbai, Lagos, Shanghai and Tokyo – could be abandoned.

It’s a bleak reminder that in the same time-scale in which, globally, we need to face the challenge of decarbonising, we also need to adapt to already inevitable changes. As New Zealand climate commissioner, Judy Lawrence recently warned, some places might have to consider seriously the idea of “coastal retreat”.

In Scotland we need to at least look both the threat and our options. There is no doubt we will need more flood prevention engineering. Some, in Edinburgh, are already looking at the Boston Barrier tidal flood defence scheme for inspiration. But we need to address this with more speed. Only earlier this year the Scottish Government was accused of “glacial progress” on flood protection after official figures showed that just seven of 42 schemes earmarked for delivery by 2021 had so far been finished.

The answer of whether to beat a "coastal retreat" or to fight back with engineering and infrastructure, will no doubt be different in each location. But, wherever there are flood risks predicted, we need to at least address it.

One of the simplest flood prevention risks is, of course, not to build on an area liable to flood. There’s no point throwing something up only for the sea to swallow it.