Abstract
Abstract. A pressing problem facing coastal decision makers is the conversion of "high-level" but plausible climate change assessments into an effective basis for climate change adaptation at the local scale. Here, we describe a web-based, geospatial decision support tool (DST) that provides an assessment of the potential flood risk for populated coastal lowlands arising from future sea-level rise, coastal storms, and high river flows. This DST has been developed to support operational and strategic decision making by enabling the user to explore the flood hazard from extreme events, changes in the extent of the flood-prone areas with sea-level rise, and thresholds of sea-level rise where current policy and resource options are no longer viable. The DST is built in an open-source GIS that uses freely available geospatial data. Flood risk assessments from a combination of LISFLOOD-FP and SWAB (Shallow Water And Boussinesq) models are embedded within the tool; the user interface enables interrogation of different combinations of coastal and river events under rising-sea-level scenarios. Users can readily vary the input parameters (sea level, storms, wave height and river flow) relative to the present-day topography and infrastructure to identify combinations where significant regime shifts or "tipping points" occur. Two case studies demonstrate the attributes of the DST with respect to the wider coastal community and the UK energy sector. Examples report on the assets at risk and illustrate the extent of flooding in relation to infrastructure access. This informs an economic assessment of potential losses due to climate change and thus provides local authorities and energy operators with essential information on the feasibility of investment for building resilience into vulnerable components of their area of responsibility.
Highlights
Society has entered a new era of climate change – one where the environmental consequences of warming are being observed and experienced directly, and in which the absence of timely, strategic intervention across the global community has taken us closer to more uncertain and potentially more catastrophic change in the medium to long term (Lowe et al, 2009)
A combination of extreme water level, wave overtopping and high river flow is given in Fig. 2d, in which the sliders bars are set to sea-level rise (0.6 m), storm level (1 : 250 yr), wave height (1 : 100 yr), and river flow (1 : 50 yr)
The general location and extent of flooding is similar to that shown in Fig. 2b, local detail shows a marked difference in the flood-prone urban area to the east and south-east of the Fleetwood
Summary
Society has entered a new era of climate change – one where the environmental consequences of warming are being observed and experienced directly, and in which the absence of timely, strategic intervention across the global community has taken us closer to more uncertain (non-linear, stochastic) and potentially more catastrophic change in the medium to long term (Lowe et al, 2009). With atmospheric CO2 concentrations having reached 400 ppm (WMO, 2014), exceeding the “safe” threshold of 350 ppm, we have entered the period of “dangerous” climate change bearing witness to unprecedented loss of Arctic ice (Hodgkins, 2014) and accelerated rates of melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (Sutterley et al, 2014). Set within this regime shift, sea-level rise during the 21st Century may follow the trajectory of semi-empirical assessments Future sea-level rise coupled with changes in the magnitude and frequency of storm surges is a key focus for such a decision support tool (DST) because of the high (and growing) proportion of the world’s population and associated infrastructure that occupies low-lying coastal regions (McGranahan et al, 2007; Nicholls et al, 2011; Hallegatte et al, 2013)
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