Sea-Level Rise Environmental Research Letters

Sea level rises poses greater threat to billions

Sea-Level Rise

• http://www.aalto.fi/en/current/news/2016-03-07-002/

More of the earth’s population lives in areas close to the sea than previously reckoned, regions that would be directly impacted by anticipated rising in sea levels as climate change continues...

By using new increased resolution datasets, Aalto University researchers estimate that 1.9 billion inhabitants, or 28% of the world’s total population, live closer than 100 km from the coast in areas less than 100 meters above the present sea level.

By 2050 the amount of people in that zone is predicted to increase to 2.4 billion, while population living lower than 5 meters will reach 500 million people. Many of these people need to adapt their livelihoods to changing climate.

Geospatial point of view

For the 2016 analysis, researchers used several global gridded datasets. They first created a geographic zoning in relation to the elevation and proximity to coast. This was then used to study the factors included in the study, which were grouped into five clusters: climate, population, agriculture, economy, and impact on environment. For the factors with temporal extent, the researchers also assessed their development over time period of 1900-2050.

The study was made in collaboration with researchers from Aalto University, Finland, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands, National Institute for Statistics, Italy, and University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Here’s the basis for their findings, a global mapping based on Altitude and Distance to the Sea [ALDIS] zones:

• http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/natlinfo/indicators/methodology_sheets/oceans_seas_coasts/pop_coastal_areas.pdf

Overview of the geographic zones.

• (A) The ALDIS zoning and the share of the global land surface area in each zone (note the logarithmic scale on both axes);
• (B) definition of ALDIS zones and meta-zones; and
• (C) map of the ALDIS zones (colours correspond to the ones in (A)-tile).

The full report has been published as an open [free] access article by Environmental Research Letters.

• http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/3/034010/meta;jsessionid=4BD4C7C4B3FE79B39DA468435543D03C.c1.iopscience.cld.iop.org

• http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/3/034010/pdf

○