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Climate change and coastal vulnerability assessment: scenarios for integrated assessment

  • Special Feature: Original Article
  • Sea-level rise
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Abstract

Coastal vulnerability assessments still focus mainly on sea-level rise, with less attention paid to other dimensions of climate change. The influence of non-climatic environmental change or socio-economic change is even less considered, and is often completely ignored. Given that the profound coastal changes of the twentieth century are likely to continue through the twenty-first century, this is a major omission, which may overstate the importance of climate change, and may also miss significant interactions of climate change with other non-climate drivers. To better support climate and coastal management policy development, more integrated assessments of climatic change in coastal areas are required, including the significant non-climatic changes. This paper explores the development of relevant climate and non-climate drivers, with an emphasis on the non-climate drivers. While these issues are applicable within any scenario framework, our ideas are illustrated using the widely used SRES scenarios, with both impacts and adaptation being considered. Importantly, scenario development is a process, and the assumptions that are made about future conditions concerning the coast need to be explicit, transparent and open to scientific debate concerning their realism and likelihood. These issues are generic across other sectors.

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Notes

  1. Similar frameworks have been developed in other global assessments such as the Global Environmental Outlook (UNEP, 2007) and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (Carpenter et al. 2005).

  2. Note that coastal population is often overstated compared to quantitative GIS-based analysis, which suggests that about 1.9 billion people (or 37% of the global population) lived within 100 km of a coastline in 1990 (see Cohen et al. 1997; Gommes et al. 1998; Small and Nicholls 2003).

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Acknowledgments

This work was stimulated by the authors' involvement in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Working Group II Report: chapter on ‘Coastal Systems and Low-Lying Areas’.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Civil Engineering and the Environment and Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, Southampton, UK

    Robert J. Nicholls

  2. Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Poh Poh Wong

  3. United States Geological Survey, Many, LA, USA 

    Virginia Burkett

  4. University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

    Colin D. Woodroffe

  5. Institute for Global Change Adaptation Science (ICAS), Ibaraki University, Mito, Japan

    John Hay

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Nicholls, R.J., Wong, P.P., Burkett, V. et al. Climate change and coastal vulnerability assessment: scenarios for integrated assessment. Sustain Sci 3, 89–102 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-008-0050-4

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