The benefits of coastal adaptation through conservation of foreshore vegetation

Due to rising sea levels and projected socio-economic change, global coastal flood risk is expected to increase in the future. To reduce this increase in risk, one option is to reduce the probability or magnitude of the hazard through the implementation of structural, Nature-based or hybrid adaptation measures. Nature-based Solutions in...

A Flood Risk Framework Capturing the Seasonality of and Dependence Between Rainfall and Sea Levels—An Application to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

State-of-the-art flood hazard maps in coastal cities are often obtained from simulating coastal or pluvial events separately. This method does not account for the seasonality of flood drivers and their mutual dependence. In this article, we include the impact of these two factors in a computationally efficient probabilistic framework for...

Hard or soft flood adaptation? Advantages of a hybrid strategy for Shanghai

Flood risk is expected to increase in coastal cities, particularly in Asian megacities such as Shanghai. This paper presents an integrated modeling framework to simulate changes in the flood risk in Shanghai and provide a cost-benefit analysis of multiple adaptation strategies used to reduce risk. The results show that the potential flood...

Commentary: The need for a high-accuracy, open-access global DEM

A Commentary on 'The Need for a High-Accuracy, Open-Access Global DEM' by Schumann, G. J.-P., and Bates, P. D. (2018). Front. Earth Sci. 6:225. doi: 10.3389/feart.2018.00225

Dependence between high sea-level and high river discharge increases flood hazard in global deltas and estuaries

When river and coastal floods coincide, their impacts are often worse than when they occur in isolation; such floods are examples of ‘compound events’. To better understand the impacts of these compound events, we require an improved understanding of the dependence between coastal and river flooding on a global scale. Therefore, in this letter,...

A comparison of two global datasets of extreme sea levels and resulting flood exposure

Estimating the current risk of coastal flooding requires adequate information on extreme sea levels. For over a decade, the only global data available was the DINAS-COAST Extreme Sea Levels (DCESL) dataset, which applies a static approximation to estimate extreme sea levels. Recently, a dynamically derived dataset was developed: the Global...