An international research team from Italy, Greece, the Netherlands and the UK, published a new research in the scientific journal Nature Communications, saying that future global warming will lead to an increase in extreme sea levels, with flood risks to coastal infrastructure and human populations.
Extreme sea levels happen through high tides and extreme weather events, which can cause storms and high wind waves. These phenomena intensify by rises in sea level and increases in tropical cyclone activity.
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For the first time, researchers considered all these processes to assess future risk of extreme sea levels out to the year 2100. They found that extreme sea level events that occur, on average, once every 100 years today, would take place almost annually along most global coastlines by the end of the century.
Dr Svetlana Jevrejeva, National Oceanography Centre, said:
The projected rise in extreme sea levels will increase the frequency of catastrophic flooding events along many of the world’s coastlines, with massive socio-economic impacts. The global coastline covers some ~620,000 km, so mitigating the impacts of increased extreme sea levels will be a major challenge.
The new results indicate that upgrades to coastal defences would require an average increased height of at least 50 cm by 2100, although in some places this may need to be in the order of 1-2 m.
Another research also found that flooding from rising sea levels could cost $14 trillion worldwide annually by 2100, if the target of holding increasing global temperatures within 2ºC of pre-industrial levels is missed.
The researchers also found that upper-middle income countries such as China would see the largest increase in flood costs, whereas the highest income countries would suffer the least, thanks to existing high levels of coastal protection infrastructure.
