Sea level rise is being misjudged in many impact assessments, a paper published in Nature says.
Over 99 per cent of evaluated impact assessments handled sea level and land elevation data inadequately, the authors say.
The study was undertaken by Katharina Seeger, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padova, and Philip Minderhoud, associate at Wageningen University & Research and Deltares in the Netherlands.
“Based on our literature evaluation, 90% of the hazard assessments assume coastal sea levels based on geoid models, rather than using actual sea-level measurements,” the authors state.
“Our meta-analyses on global scale show that measured coastal sea level is higher than assumed in most hazard assessments,” they say.
“Regionally, predominantly in the Global South, measured mean sea level can be more than one metre above global geoids, with the largest differences in the Indo-Pacific,” they state.
Compared with geoid-based assumptions of coastal sea level, the measured values suggest that with a hypothetical 1 m of relative sea-level rise, 31–37% more land and 48–68% more people would fall below sea level, they say.
The results “highlight the need for re-evaluation of existing coastal impact assessments and improvement of research community standards, with possible implications for policymakers, climate finance and coastal adaptation”, they state.
Read The Nature paper here
