Scenarios for Coastal Vulnerability Assessment

Nicholls, Robert J.; Woodroffe, Colin D.; Burkett, Virginia; Hay, John E.; Wong, Philip; Nurse, Leonard

doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-374711-2.01217-1

Cited by 44 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 83 publications

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“…Rising sea levels will affect tens of millions of people who live in low-lying coastal areas, as well as infrastructure and capital assets, vulnerable ecosystems, cultural heritage, major port cities, and island nations (IPCC, 2014;Melillo et al, 2014). The potential damages to coasts from sea level rise (SLR) and storm surge include accelerated erosion of beaches and cliffs, permanent inundation of low-lying zones, increased flooding, saltwater intrusion into aquifers and surface water resources, and degradation of coastal wetlands that are rich in habitat and biological diversity and provide important services such as flood protection (Dasgupta et al, 2007;Nicholls et al, 2007;Nicholls, 2011;Hinkel et al, 2013b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating Global Damages from Sea Level Rise with the Coastal Impact and Adaptation Model (CIAM)

Diaz

2015

SSRN Journal

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The costs of coastal sector impacts from sea level rise (SLR) are an important component of the total projected economic damages of climate change, a major input to decision-making and design of climate policy. Moreover, the ultimate costs to coastal resources will depend strongly on adaptation, society's response to cope with the impacts. This paper presents a new model to assess coastal impacts from SLR, combining global scope with high spatial resolution to fill a gap between very detailed local studies and aggregate global estimates. The Coastal Impact and Adaptation Model (CIAM) determines the optimal strategy for adaptation at the local level, evaluating over 12,000 coastal segments, as described in the DIVA database (Vafeidis et al, 2006), based on their socioeconomic characteristics and the potential impacts of relative sea level rise and uncertain storm surge. An application of CIAM is then presented to demonstrate the model's ability to assess local impacts and direct costs, choose the least-cost adaptation, and estimate global net damages for several probabilistic SLR scenarios (Kopp et al, 2014). CIAM finds that there is large potential for coastal adaptation to reduce the expected impacts of SLR compared to the alternative of no adaptation, lowering global net present costs by a factor of 10 to less than $1.5 trillion over the next two centuries, although this does not include initial transition costs to overcome an under-adapted current state. In addition to producing aggregate estimates, CIAM results can also be interpreted at the local level, where we find that retreat (e.g., relocate inland) is often a more cost-effective adaptation strategy than protect (e.g., construct physical defenses).

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating Global Damages from Sea Level Rise with the Coastal Impact and Adaptation Model (CIAM)

Diaz

2015

SSRN Journal

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“…In general, for tropical islands remote from the poles, the fingerprinting may slightly enhance SLR. We then compute island-specific projections under various special report on emission scenarios (SRES) possible futures (Nakicenovic and Swart 2000; Nicholls et al 2012) using projections of global mean SLR from the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Meehl et al 2007). We also consider an example of semi-empirical projections published since the AR4 (e.g., Rahmstorf 2007;Grinsted et al 2009;Jevrejeva et al 2010Jevrejeva et al , 2012.…”

Section: Approach and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Physical basis of coastal adaptation on tropical small islands

et al. 2013

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Small tropical islands are widely recognized as having high exposure and vulnerability to climate change and other natural hazards. Ocean warming and acidification, changing storm patterns and intensity, and accelerated sea-level rise pose challenges that compound the intrinsic vulnerability of small, remote, island communities. Sustainable development requires robust guidance on the risks associated with natural hazards and climate change, including the potential for island coasts and reefs to keep pace with rising sea levels. Here we review these issues with special attention to their implications for climatechange vulnerability, adaptation, and disaster risk reduction in various island settings. We present new projections for 2010-2100 local sea-level rise (SLR) at 18 island sites, incorporating crustal motion and gravitational fingerprinting, for a range of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change global projections and a semi-empirical model. Projected 90-year SLR for the upper limit A1FI scenario with enhanced glacier drawdown ranges from 0.56 to 1.01 m for islands with a measured range of vertical motion from -0.29 to ?0.10 m. We classify tropical small islands into four broad groups comprising continental fragments, volcanic islands, near-atolls and atolls, and high carbonate islands including raised atolls. Because exposure to coastal forcing and hazards varies with island form, this provides a framework for consideration of vulnerability and adaptation strategies. Nevertheless, appropriate measures to adjust for climate change and to mitigate disaster risk depend on a place-based understanding of island landscapes and of processes operating in the coastal biophysical system of individual islands.

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“…This domain poses a stringent test on the model's cross-scale capability due to its complex geometry and bathymetry, as well as its highly variable stratification [15]. Moreover, the Bay processes are closely linked to both the small-scale processes occurring in the tributaries/sub-tributaries (such as the point/non-point sources of freshwater inputs) and the large-scale processes in the coastal ocean (such as the wind-induced Ekman transport) [14,[16][17][18][19]. …”

Section: Spatial Domainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-Scale Baroclinic Simulation of the Effect of Channel Dredging in an Estuarine Setting

Zhang

Wang

et al. 2018

Water

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Holistic simulation approaches are often required to assess human impacts on a river-estuary-coastal system, due to the intrinsically linked processes of contrasting spatial scales. In this paper, a Semi-implicit Cross-scale Hydroscience Integrated System Model (SCHISM) is applied in quantifying the impact of a proposed hydraulic engineering project on the estuarine hydrodynamics. The project involves channel dredging and land expansion that traverse several spatial scales on an ocean-estuary-river-tributary axis. SCHISM is suitable for this undertaking due to its flexible horizontal and vertical grid design and, more importantly, its efficient high-order implicit schemes applied in both the momentum and transport calculations. These techniques and their advantages are briefly described along with the model setup. The model features a mixed horizontal grid with quadrangles following the shipping channels and triangles resolving complex geometries elsewhere. The grid resolution ranges from~6.3 km in the coastal ocean to 15 m in the project area. Even with this kind of extreme scale contrast, the baroclinic model still runs stably and accurately at a time step of 2 min, courtesy of the implicit schemes. We highlight that the implicit transport solver alone reduces the total computational cost by 82%, as compared to its explicit counterpart. The base model is shown to be well calibrated, then it is applied in simulating the proposed project scenario. The project-induced modifications on salinity intrusion, gravitational circulation, and transient events are quantified and analyzed.

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Scenarios for Coastal Vulnerability Assessment

Cited by 44 publications

References 83 publications

Estimating Global Damages from Sea Level Rise with the Coastal Impact and Adaptation Model (CIAM)

Estimating Global Damages from Sea Level Rise with the Coastal Impact and Adaptation Model (CIAM)

Physical basis of coastal adaptation on tropical small islands

Cross-Scale Baroclinic Simulation of the Effect of Channel Dredging in an Estuarine Setting

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