scholarly journals Quantitative Coastal Resilience Assessment Framework under Climate Change and Sea Level Rise

Author(s):  
Tao Wu

Accompanied by increasing population growth and urban sprawl, most coastal cities are unprecedentedly vulnerable to climate change and its impacts, such as sea level rise, increasing extreme storm events, and coastal flooding. Coastal resilience and sustainable development are antidotes to vulnerability; they aim to enhance the adaptive capability of absorbing disturbances and resisting uncertainty. This study explores building a quantitative assessment framework to measure resilience and provide an objective and comparable method to understand the strengths and weaknesses in a given region. The proposed 25 resilience indicators incorporate the aspects of essential livelihood protection, infrastructure and natural resource maintenance, emergency facilities and institutions, floodplain management regulations, and adaptive planning process. Each indicator is assigned the resilience quality that includes robustness, resourcefulness, redundancy, and rapidity. The aggregated resilience quality scoring reflects the systematic performance of the city to cope with the coastal hazards. The innovative part of this framework is combining hazard mitigation measures, climate adaptation strategies, and sustainable development goals together to achieve a comprehensive assessment method. In the case of New Haven, the resilience assessment is taken as a practical monitoring tool and decision-making support.

Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 1142
Author(s):  
Juliano Calil ◽  
Geraldine Fauville ◽  
Anna Carolina Muller Queiroz ◽  
Kelly L. Leo ◽  
Alyssa G. Newton Mann ◽  
...  

As coastal communities around the globe contend with the impacts of climate change including coastal hazards such as sea level rise and more frequent coastal storms, educating stakeholders and the general public has become essential in order to adapt to and mitigate these risks. Communicating SLR and other coastal risks is not a simple task. First, SLR is a phenomenon that is abstract as it is physically distant from many people; second, the rise of the sea is a slow and temporally distant process which makes this issue psychologically distant from our everyday life. Virtual reality (VR) simulations may offer a way to overcome some of these challenges, enabling users to learn key principles related to climate change and coastal risks in an immersive, interactive, and safe learning environment. This article first presents the literature on environmental issues communication and engagement; second, it introduces VR technology evolution and expands the discussion on VR application for environmental literacy. We then provide an account of how three coastal communities have used VR experiences developed by multidisciplinary teams—including residents—to support communication and community outreach focused on SLR and discuss their implications.


Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 545
Author(s):  
Alexis K. Mills ◽  
Peter Ruggiero ◽  
John P. Bolte ◽  
Katherine A. Serafin ◽  
Eva Lipiec

Coastal communities face heightened risk to coastal flooding and erosion hazards due to sea-level rise, changing storminess patterns, and evolving human development pressures. Incorporating uncertainty associated with both climate change and the range of possible adaptation measures is essential for projecting the evolving exposure to coastal flooding and erosion, as well as associated community vulnerability through time. A spatially explicit agent-based modeling platform, that provides a scenario-based framework for examining interactions between human and natural systems across a landscape, was used in Tillamook County, OR (USA) to explore strategies that may reduce exposure to coastal hazards within the context of climate change. Probabilistic simulations of extreme water levels were used to assess the impacts of variable projections of sea-level rise and storminess both as individual climate drivers and under a range of integrated climate change scenarios through the end of the century. Additionally, policy drivers, modeled both as individual management decisions and as policies integrated within adaptation scenarios, captured variability in possible human response to increased hazards risk. The relative contribution of variability and uncertainty from both climate change and policy decisions was quantified using three stakeholder relevant landscape performance metrics related to flooding, erosion, and recreational beach accessibility. In general, policy decisions introduced greater variability and uncertainty to the impacts of coastal hazards than climate change uncertainty. Quantifying uncertainty across a suite of coproduced performance metrics can help determine the relative impact of management decisions on the adaptive capacity of communities under future climate scenarios.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-43
Author(s):  
Anushiya Jeganathan ◽  
Ramachandran Andimuthu ◽  
Palanivelu Kandasamy

Cities are dynamic systems resulting from the complex interaction of various socio-ecological and environmental developments. Climate change disproportionately affects cities mostly located in climate-sensitive areas; thus, these urban systems are the most critical in modern societies under changing climate scenarios, uncertain disruptions, and urban inhabitants' daily lives. It is essential to analyze the challenges in the metropolitan area through the lens of climate change. The present work analyses the challenges in Chennai, a coastal city in India and one of the chief industrial growth canters in Indian and South Asian region. The challenges are analyzed through the city’s system analysis via land use, green cover, population, and coastal hazards. Land use and green cover changes are studied through satellite images using ArcGIS and assessing coastal risks due to sea-level rise through GIS-based inundation model. There are drastic changes in land-use patterns; the green cover had reduced much, including agricultural and forest cover due to rapid urbanization. The land use has changed to 59.6% of the reduction in agriculture land, nearly 40% reduction in forest land, and 47% of the wetland over time. The observed mean sea level trend for Chennai is + 0.55 mm/year from 1916 to 2015 and the area of 21.75 sq. km is under the threat of inundation to 0.5m sea-level rise. The population growth, drastic changes in land use pattern, green cover reduction, and inundation due to sea-level rise increase the city's risks to climate change. There is a need to ensure that future land-use developments do not worsen the current climate risk level, either through influencing the hazards themselves or affecting the urban system's future vulnerability and adaptive capacity. The study also urges the zone level adaptation strategies to ensure the resilience of the city.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Priestley ◽  
Zoë Heine ◽  
Taciano L Milfont

Sea-level rise resulting from climate change is impacting coasts around the planet. There is strong scientific consensus about the amount of sea-level rise to 2050 (0.24–0.32 m) and a range of projections to 2100, which vary depending on the approach used and the mitigation measures taken to reduce carbon emissions. Despite this strong scientific consensus regarding the reality of climate change-related sea-level rise, and the associated need to engage publics in adaptation and mitigation efforts, there is a lack of empirical evidence regarding people’s understanding of the issue. Here we investigate public understanding of the amount, rate and causes of sea-level rise. Data from a representative sample of New Zealand adults showed a suprising tendency for the public to overestimate the scientifically plausible amount of sea-level rise by 2100 and to identify melting sea ice as its primary causal mechanism. These findings will be valuable for scientists communicating about sea-level rise, communicators seeking to engage publics on the issue of sea-level rise, and media reporting on sea-level rise.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (7) ◽  
pp. e0254348
Author(s):  
Rebecca K. Priestley ◽  
Zoë Heine ◽  
Taciano L. Milfont

Sea-level rise resulting from climate change is impacting coasts around the planet. There is strong scientific consensus about the amount of sea-level rise to 2050 (0.24–0.32 m) and a range of projections to 2100, which vary depending on the approach used and the mitigation measures taken to reduce carbon emissions. Despite this strong scientific consensus regarding the reality of climate change-related sea-level rise, and the associated need to engage publics in adaptation and mitigation efforts, there is a lack of empirical evidence regarding people’s understanding of the issue. Here we investigate public understanding of the amount, rate and causes of sea-level rise. Data from a representative sample of New Zealand adults showed a suprising tendency for the public to overestimate the scientifically plausible amount of sea-level rise by 2100 and to identify melting sea ice as its primary causal mechanism. These findings will be valuable for scientists communicating about sea-level rise, communicators seeking to engage publics on the issue of sea-level rise, and media reporting on sea-level rise.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Priestley ◽  
Zoë Heine ◽  
Taciano L Milfont

Sea-level rise resulting from climate change is impacting coasts around the planet. There is strong scientific consensus about the amount of sea-level rise to 2050 (0.24–0.32 m) and a range of projections to 2100, which vary depending on the approach used and the mitigation measures taken to reduce carbon emissions. Despite this strong scientific consensus regarding the reality of climate change-related sea-level rise, and the associated need to engage publics in adaptation and mitigation efforts, there is a lack of empirical evidence regarding people’s understanding of the issue. Here we investigate public understanding of the amount, rate and causes of sea-level rise. Data from a representative sample of New Zealand adults showed a suprising tendency for the public to overestimate the scientifically plausible amount of sea-level rise by 2100 and to identify melting sea ice as its primary causal mechanism. These findings will be valuable for scientists communicating about sea-level rise, communicators seeking to engage publics on the issue of sea-level rise, and media reporting on sea-level rise.


2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ibon Galarraga ◽  
Nuria Osés ◽  
Anil Markandya ◽  
Aline Chiabai ◽  
Kaysara Khatun

As a consequence of Climate Change sea level rise as well as a change in the intensity and propensity of rain are expected in the Basque Country. Valuing the costs and benefits of adapting to these changes becomes an important piece of information for the planning process. This paper develops two methodological frameworks. The first one devoted to estimating the economic impacts to urban areas of an increase in the risk of flooding. The values estimated for the Nervión river in the city of Amurrio (Álava) indicate that the average expected damage will increase in 15 per cent as a consequence of CC (from €56,097 to €64,451). For an extreme episode the total loss could increase to €20 million. The second framework is oriented towards the valuation of the damages as a consequence of sea level rise for 2100. The values in this case range from €87 to €231 million, that is, between €0.87 and €2.3 million per hectare.


2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (9) ◽  
pp. 2176-2208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Barron ◽  
Glenis Canete ◽  
Jeff Carmichael ◽  
David Flanders ◽  
Ellen Pond ◽  
...  

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