Three Times More People At Risk From Yearly Coastal Flooding Than Previously Thought
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Before today, sea level rise and flooding were already forecast to wreak havoc for millions now and in the coming decades. Now, the story looks much worse-three times worse, to be precise. According to new research, hundreds of millions more people are already at risk from climate breakdown-caused coastal flooding and sea level rise than previously thought. And by the end of the century, large swathes of the coastal land we live on today could be unihabitable-even with immediate and deep emissions cuts.
This may not sound like much, but for millions of people two or three metres is the difference between safety or loss of livelihood and forced relocation. Thankfully, a handful of nations have now scanned coastal elevation using airborne laser-based radar equipment, and the new research, published in Nature Communications, uses the difference between these much more precise data and previously existing figures to recalibrate global estimates for land at risk of sea-level rise and flooding.
Based on the new model, the authors estimate not 28m but 110m people are already living below the current high tide line. And instead of 68m people living below annual flood levels, the figure is now 250m-the same number that live less than one metre above sea level. That's the equivalent of the UK, Russia, and Spain combined.
This increase in vulnerability to sea-level rise and flooding is not evenly distributed. More than 70% of those living on at-risk land are in eight Asian countries: China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan. And for many of these countries, the increase in risk that the new model predicts for the coming decades is much higher than three-fold.
Of course, it's not just Asia that's vulnerable-20 other countries outside of the continent are expected to see land that is currently home to 10% of their total populations fall below end-of-century high tide lines, even if emissions peak by 2020 and are then cut deeply. This count is up from two using NASA's data. All but three are island nations, and 13 of the 20 are small developing island states.
[...] The sad reality is that coastal communities worldwide look to be set for much more difficult futures than currently anticipated. As a global community, governments must work together to do all they can to help.
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