Emerging threatsOptimal strategies to cope with climate change depend on the pace of change
What would we do differently if sea level were to rise one foot per century versus one foot per decade? Until now, most policy and research has focused on adapting to specific amounts of climate change and not on how fast that climate change might happen. Researchers, using sea-level rise as a case study, have developed a quantitative model that considers different rates of sea-level rise, in addition to economic factors, and shows how consideration of rates of change affect optimal adaptation strategies.
What would we do differently if sea level were to rise one foot per century versus one foot per decade? Until now, most policy and research has focused on adapting to specific amounts of climate change and not on how fast that climate change might happen.
Carnegie Science says that researchers at Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology, using sea-level rise as a case study, have developed a quantitative model that considers different rates of sea-level rise, in addition to economic factors, and shows how consideration of rates of change affect optimal adaptation strategies. If the sea level will rise slowly, it could still make sense to build near the shoreline, but if the sea level is going to rise quickly, then a buffer zone along the shoreline might make more sense.
The research is published in the 4 October 2016 issue of the Environmental Research Letters.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has defined adaptation as “the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects.” Nearly all of the literature on the damage from climate change and adaptation to it focuses on amounts of change: that is, the damage from a world that is 3.6°F (2°C) warmer and a sea level that is three feet higher. But the world is more likely to get progressively warmer, with sea-level rise getting progressively higher.
“It is a very different thing to adapt to a sea level that is three feet higher if you think that sea level will rise no farther after that, than to adapt to a sea-level rise that is three feet higher with the expectation that the seas will keep rising,” remarked Soheil Shayegh, a former Carnegie postdoc and lead author of the study.
The researchers analyzed how the rate of sea-level rise affects economic decision making in coastal areas in four scenarios. In the first scenario, there is no adaptation, and people build on land that will be flooded. In the second scenario, people take into consideration some future, specific amount of sea level rise, and create a no-build buffer zone prohibiting development along the coast. In the third scenario, people adapt to ongoing rates of change and consider whether buildings are likely to be flooded during their economically productive lifetime. In the last scenario, people try to adapt by protecting themselves with dikes or seawalls.
