Assessing climate change impacts, sea level rise and storm surge risk in port cities: a case study on Copenhagen

By Stéphane Hallegatte, N. Ranger, O. Mestre, Patrice Dumas, J. Corfee-Morlot, C. Herweijer, R. Wood. 2008

445 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study illustrates a methodology to assess the economic impacts of climate change at a city scale and benefits of adaptation, taking the case of sea level rise and storm surge risk in the city of Copenhagen, capital of Denmark. The approach is a simplified catastrophe risk assessment, to calculate the direct costs of storm surges under scenarios of sea level rise, coupled to an economic input–output (IO) model. The output is a risk assessment of the direct and indirect economic impacts of storm surge under climate change, including, for example, production and job losses and reconstruction duration, and the benefits of investment in upgraded sea defences. The simplified catastrophe risk assessment entails a statistical analysis of storm surge characteristics, geographical-information analysis of population and asset exposure combined with aggregated vulnerability information. For the city of Copenhagen, it is found that in absence of adaptation, sea level rise would significantly increase flood risks. Results call for the introduction of adaptation in long-term urban planning, as one part of a comprehensive strategy to manage the implications of climate change in the city. Mitigation policies can also aid adaptation by limiting the pace of future sea level rise.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b2144f384968ea46f009c7387253dd5e4322263e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

1. J. Corfee-Morlot
2. Stéphane Hallegatte
3. Rafael Reuveny
4. Chang Hoon Oh

In Oceanography

1. Stéphane Hallegatte

Citations in the corpus

• Regional indirect economic impact evaluation of the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake (2011, methodology): “This model has been comprehensively described by Hallegatte (2008), and it has been applied to assess the climate change impacts of the Hurricane Katrina on Louisiana, of the sea level rise on Copenhagen (Hallegatte et al. 2011), and of the flood on Mumbai (Ranger et al.”
• Future Coastal Population Growth and Exposure to Sea-Level Rise and Coastal Flooding - A Global Assessment (2015, unknown): “[41].”
• Understanding climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptation at city scale: an introduction (2011, background): “A more detailed discussion of these categories and of the question of double-counting is provided in the concept paper of this issue ( Hallegatte et al. 2011b ).”