Coastal Futures: interactive tool showing how climate change could affect coastal areas
How will the coastal areas of the world be affected by global warming? This is an important question for coastal communities and coastal scientists, engineers, planners, managers and policy makers. A new online viewer provides a quick overview of projections for sea-level rise, coastal flooding, shoreline retreat and extreme waves by combining several published state-of-the-art data sets on coastal climatic impact-drivers.
The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 WGI assessment states with high confidence that all coastal climatic-impact drivers that were considered in the AR6 – including relative sea-level rise, coastal flooding and coastal erosion - will increase by mid-century in almost all regions of the world. This means that adaptation is urgently needed to reduce climate change induced risks for coastal communities, properties and other assets. To decide what to do where and when, policy makers need reliable information underpinned by science.
An IHE Delft team led by Professor Roshanka Ranasinghe, an expert on climate change impacts and coastal risk and a Coordinating Lead Author in IPCC AR6 WGI, created the viewer in response to the many requests for overview projections received from people around the world.