An examination of land use impacts of flooding induced by sea level rise

Abstract

Abstract. Coastal regions become unprecedentedly vulnerable to coastal hazards that are associated with sea level rise. The purpose of this paper is therefore to simulate prospective urban exposure to changing sea levels. This article first applied the cellular-automaton-based SLEUTH model (Project Gigalopolis, 2016) to calibrate historical urban dynamics in Bay County, Florida (USA) -a region that is greatly threatened by rising sea levels. This paper estimated five urban growth parameters by multiple-calibration procedures that used different Monte Carlo iterations to account for modeling uncertainties. It then employed the calibrated model to predict three scenarios of urban growth up to 2080 -historical trend, urban sprawl, and compact development. We also assessed land use impacts of four policies: no regulations; flood mitigation plans based on the whole study region and on those areas that are prone to experience growth; and the protection of conservational lands. This study lastly overlaid projected urban areas in 2030 and 2080 with 500-year flooding maps that were developed under 0, 0.2, and 0.9 m sea level rise. The calibration results that a substantial number of built-up regions extend from established coastal settlements. The predictions suggest that total flooded area of new urbanized regions in 2080 would be more than 25 times that under the flood mitigation policy, if the urbanization progresses with few policy interventions. The joint model generates new knowledge in the domain between land use modeling and sea level rise. It contributes to coastal spatial planning by helping develop hazard mitigation schemes and can be employed in other international communities that face combined pressure of urban growth and climate change.

Impact Assessment Analysis of Sea Level Rise in Denmark: A Case Study of Falster Island, Guldborgsund

“…Land management helps to address many of the challenges that are present when working with climate change adaptation planning. Flood and land use modeling can aid in policy formulation to control urban development as well as enforcing beneficial land use practices in areas prone to SLR as noted on Falster island [30]. Such studies were conducted in other areas of Denmark, employing multi-criteria analysis of future land use simulation in order to identify areas which are potentially vulnerable to future climate change and SLR, highlighting the potential for wide scale implementation of such techniques [31].…”

Climate Change Preparedness: Comparing Future Urban Growth and Flood Risk in Amsterdam and Houston

“…Most of these studies used future growth scenarios such as “business as usual”, “compact development”, and “environmental protection”. Each scenario is defined below: “business as usual:” same growth pattern as previous growth pattern [29,30]“compact development:” controlling development density [29]“environmental protection:” restricting development location beyond environmentally sensitive areas [31]…”

“…Most urban growth scenarios considered measures such as urban density [29,31] and economic growth [9,32] when developing “compact development”. Inversely, “environmental protection” scenarios are typically based on the amount of ecological areas preserved or species richness [30,31,33].…”

“…Song et al (2017) assessed total growth damage area in different urban growth locations and density scenarios. These scenarios targeted areas impacted by hurricane and accounted for SLR by 2030 and 2080, storm surge, and the 500-year floodplain [29]. Te Linde et al (2011) predicted economic growth scenarios for the Rhine River’s flood probability by 2050 [9].…”

Risk assessment of shanghai extreme flooding under the land use change scenario

“…Urban spatial model is an effective tool for understanding the process of urbanization and future scenarios, supporting urban planning and management policies, and evaluating the impact of the urbanization process on the environment and ecosystem (Liu et al 2017;Filatova et al 2016). In the eld of ood disaster research, urban spatial models such as GeoSOS-FLUS model have been applied to future scenario analysis of elements at risk (Kim and Newma 2020; Liang et al 2018;Song et al 2017), so as to better reveal the dynamics of ood risk. Wu (2020) took Chongming's land use as the research object, considered its different future development directions, designed 3 kinds of land use change scenarios, and selected a series of driving factors, then used GeoSOS-FLUS software to predict Chongming distribution of land use in 2035.…”