An interesting article we found that touches on the same subjects BlueGreen Governance deals with.
Sönke Dangendorf: “Coastal resilience needs to move away from static, one-size-fits-all approaches toward strategies that are adaptive and locally informed.”
Research published in Nature Climate Change indicates that anthropogenic sea-level rise has increased the occurrence of extreme coastal sea-level events by a factor of four since 1900. These results demonstrate that climate change has already had a substantial impact on coastal flood hazards and emphasize the importance of incorporating these changes into future adaptation and risk-reduction policies.
Extreme sea-level events arise when elevated average sea levels coincide with tidal fluctuations and storm surges, causing coastal flooding that can harm both infrastructure and natural ecosystems. While the long-term trend of rising sea levels has been extensively documented, the degree to which human activities have influenced the frequency of extreme flooding events has remained less certain.
To investigate this issue, Sönke Dangendorf from Tulane University, New Orleans and colleagues from various other institutes combined data from tide-gauge records with climate model simulations, examining changes in the frequency of extreme sea levels between 1900 and 2005. Their global assessment revealed that the median occurrence rate of a flood, previously expected only once every 100 years, increased more than twelvefold during the study period. As a result, such events now occur, on average, once every eight years. The researchers found that human-induced radiative forcing—the alteration of Earth’s energy balance through factors such as greenhouse gas emissions and land-use changes—was responsible for approximately a fourfold increase in the likelihood of these extreme events.
Based on the substantial increase in the frequency of extreme sea-level events, the authors argue that rapid adaptation measures and continued mitigation efforts are essential to reduce future flood risks.