Climate change adaptations are going on all around South Florida to prepare for and fight back against sea-level rise. While they’re important and necessary, there may come a day in the not-too-distant future when they stop working because the ocean will keep rising and eventually, it becomes too expensive to keep adapting over and over.

That brings us to a very complicated and controversial climate change solution, but one that most climate scientists feel is inevitable: managed retreat.

We know that chaotic retreat happens after big disasters like Hurricane Irma, but managed retreat is trying to get out ahead of the problem.

"We are going to lose land to climate change impacts, whether its sea level rise where the land just goes underwater, to flood plains that expand as a result of rain bombs dropping so much water at once," said Alice Hill, who worked in the Obama administration and is an expert on managed retreat.

A.R. Siders, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware, has been researching managed retreat for years.

“The general principles behind a managed retreat, what would make it different from chaotic retreat, are really having agency over the choice, so making it feel like people who are retreating making it feel like this is a choice for them," Siders said.

Retreat may seem like something in the distant future, but as University of Miami professor Katharine Mach told NBC6, it’s already happening.

“We look to the Netherlands as one of the greatest examples of feats of engineering to manage water and river systems from rainfall, low-lying agricultural areas, but in these processes, where there's been a lot of engineering, there also has been a real emphasis on making room for the river," Mach said. "So restoring the banks of a river, such that when it floods, natural flood plains can help absorb that water."

New Orleans is one of the most vulnerable cities on the planet when it comes to sea level rise, but it's actually the unprotected bayous south of the Crescent City that are disappearing at a shocking rate. Isle De Jean Charles, once home to 300 families, has shrunk by 98% since 1995 because of the rising Gulf Of Mexico.

In 2016, the Louisiana Office of Community Development won a $48 million grant to relocate the residents 40 miles north to a brand new town with brand new homes and brand new infrastructure, appropriately called The New Isle.

Building 100 new homes is certainly a good start, but what about the thousands of other people living in Louisiana right now that will be underwater in the coming years?

Managed retreat is happening much closer to home in the Florida Keys. In parts 4 and 5 of our 5-part series, we’ll take a look at why the Keys are so vulnerable to sea-level rise, show how adaptations and retreat are both happening right now and ultimately ask the question: Is it too late to save the Florida Keys?