The economic impact of substantial sea-level rise

By David Anthoff, Robert J. Nicholls, Richard S. J. Tol. 2010

127 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using the FUND model, an impact assessment is conducted over the 21st century for rises in sea level of up to 2-m/century and a range of socio-economic scenarios downscaled to the national level, including the four SRES (IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios) storylines. Unlike a traditional impact assessment, this analysis considers impacts after balancing the costs of retreat with the costs of protection, including the effects of coastal squeeze. While the costs of sea-level rise increase with greater rise due to growing damage and protection costs, the model suggests that an optimum response in a benefit-cost sense remains widespread protection of developed coastal areas, as identified in earlier analyses. The socio-economic scenarios are also important in terms of influencing these costs. In terms of the four components of costs considered in FUND, protection dominates, with substantial costs from wetland loss under some scenarios. The regional distribution of costs shows that a few regions experience most of the costs, especially East Asia, North America, Europe and South Asia. Importantly, this analysis suggests that protection is much more likely and rational than is widely assumed, even with a large rise in sea level. This is underpinned by the strong economic growth in all the SRES scenarios: without this growth, the benefits of protection are significantly reduced. It should also be noted that some important limitations to the analysis are discussed, which collectively suggest that protection may not be as widespread as suggested in the FUND results.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Oceanography, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3925ea35691cf59382462a818f0de389bac391c

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Citations in the corpus

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜 (2021, background): “6 Is it fair or just to ask, for example, that the residents of the Maldives (likely to be underwater by 2100 [6]) or the 800,000 people in Sudan affected”
Upper limit for sea level projections by 2100 (2014, background): “As financial infrastructure is being concentrated at faster rates in urban areas than in countries as a whole (Anthoff et al 2009), and since the majority of large cities are located along coastlines, the implications for planning of the Dismal theorem should be considered in addition to the 5%…”
Estimating global damages from sea level rise with the Coastal Impact and Adaptation Model (CIAM) (2015, methodology): “3Fankhauser’s reduced-form cost-benefit rule has been formalized in the FUND model (Tol 1996), which has been used for numerous analyses of the economic impacts of SLR (e.g., Darwin and Tol 2001; Nicholls et al. 2008; Tol 2007; Anthoff et al. 2010).”