Vulnerability of coastal areas to sea-level rise

Abstract

Assessment of the vulnerability of the various resources of the world's coastal zones to an acceleration of sea-level rise (ASLR) and related climate change effects requires detailed global information on the distribution, density and state of the resources and on the impacting hazardous events. For many resources, such as ecosystems for instance, data on a global scale are not readily available. Another complication is that in order to assess the consequences of hazardous events the response of coastal systems and their response time scales need to be known at a sufficient level of accuracy, which is not generally the case. Within the limits of these constraints this study considers the following three resources of the coastal zone and accompanying impacts: population at risk (i.e. the number of people subject to regular flooding) on a global scale; wetlands at loss (i.e. the ecologically valuable coastal wetland area under a serious threat of loss) on a global scale; rice production at change (i.e. the potential changes in coastal rice yields due to less favourable conditions) in South, Southeast and East Asia.