Assessing risk of and adaptation to sea-level rise in the European Union: an application of DIVA

Abstract

This paper applies the DIVA model to assess the risk of and adaptation to sealevel rise for the European Union in the 21st century under the A2 and B1 scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. For each scenario, impacts are estimated without and with adaptation in the form of increasing dike heights and nourishing beaches. Before 2050, the level of impacts is primarily determined by socio-economic development. In 2100 and assuming no adaptation, 780×10 3 people/year are estimated to be affected by coastal flooding under A2 and 200×10 3 people/year under B1. The total monetary damage caused by flooding, salinity intrusion, land erosion and migration is projected to be about US$ 17×10 9 under both scenarios in 2100; damage costs relative to GDP are highest for the Netherlands (0.3% of GDP under A2). Adaptation reduces the number of people flooded by factors of 110 to 288 and total damage costs by factors of 7 to 9. In 2100 adaptation costs are projected to be US$ 3.5×10 9 under A2 and 2.6×10 9 under B1; adaptation costs relative to GDP are highest for Estonia (0.16% under A2) and Ireland (0.05% under A2). These results suggest that adaptation measures to sea-level rise are beneficial and affordable, and will be widely applied throughout the European Union.

Developments in large-scale coastal flood hazard mapping

“…During extreme conditions, most hydro-and morphodynamic processes are accelerated, with the most dramatic implication being the fact that the water level can exceed the height of natural (e.g., dunes, cliffs) or anthropic barriers (e.g., sea walls, dykes), and reach areas not prepared to interact with the water element, often with catastrophic consequences. This is the reason that marine storms are considered as extreme when they coincide with coastal inundation, and inundation maps are a crucial element for several coastal management and engineering practices, i.e., post-evaluation of extreme events, coastal planning, definition of set-back lines (Ferreira et al, 2006), and evaluation of adaptation options (Cooper and Pile, 2014;Hinkel et al, 2010).…”

“…The static inundation approach ("bath tub") considers all the areas with elevation lower than the forcing water level as flooded, comes with low computational costs and can easily be performed in GIS (geographic information system) environments (Seenath et al, 2016); for that reason it has been extensively used for studies of different scales (Hinkel et al, 2010(Hinkel et al, , 2014Vousdoukas et al, 2012c). However, given the high complexity of coastal flooding processes, several recent studies showed that the static approach results in substantial overestimation of the flood extent compared to dedicated hydraulic models, especially in flatter terrains (Breilh et al, 2013;Gallien, 2016;Ramirez et al, 2016;Seenath et al, 2016).…”

Multi-hazard assessment in Europe under climate change

“…A number of climate change impact studies at the European level have been achieved, usually for a single specific climate or weather hazard, such as river floods (Rojas et al 2012;Alfieri et al 2015), coastal floods (Nicholls and Klein 2005;Hinkel et al 2010), heat waves (Fischer and Schär 2010;Russo et al 2015;Christidis et al 2015), streamflow droughts (Lehner et al 2006;Forzieri et al 2014), windstorms (Nikulin et al 2011;Outten and Esau 2013) and wildfires (Bedia et al 2013;Migliavacca et al 2013a). The study of multiple hazards poses two major challenges: (1) hazards are not directly comparable as their processes and describing metrics differ; and (2) hazards can interact triggering cascade effects and coupled dynamics.…”

Divergent options to cope with vulnerability in subsiding deltas

“…The DIVA tool (Vafeidis et al 2008;Hinkel and Klein 2009;Hinkel et al 2010) was obtained from Jochen Hinkel, maintaining the tool for the DINAS-COAST consortium. DIVA combines a global database of the world's coast broken down in coastal segments of variable length with a world climate and socio-economic model.…”