Indirect impacts of coastal climate change and sea-level rise: the UK example

Abstract

Owing to globalization, the potential impacts of climate change/sea-level rise in one country/region are likely to affect and be felt elsewhere. Such indirect impacts could be significant but have received a limited analysis. This deficiency is addressed here using the indirect impacts on coastal infrastructure for the UK as an example. National opportunities and threats are identified. Potential indirect national threats include disruption of supply chains, security threats due to forced migration, a decline in national prestige, and impacts on the finance and insurance industries. Potential opportunities include export of world-leading coastal hazard and management expertise, and benefits to national prestige conferred by a strong response to climate change. Such opportunities and threats depend on several distinct dimensions of change, especially the magnitude of climate and socio-economic change, and the success/failure of appropriate responses. Promoting adaptation and climate mitigation is important to exploit the opportunities and address the threats. Adaptation should deal with more than the effects of climate change and link to the wider development agenda. These lessons are transferable to other developed countries and, indeed, many of the actions will be strengthened by collective action.

Policy relevance

National-level measures to address these indirect impacts will make a positive contribution to the global effort in addressing climate change (e.g. supporting emissions reductions). Countries should include the indirect effects of climate change in national assessments so that the national context and useful responses can be identified. Cooperation between nations is also important; countries must act together to more effectively address the direct and indirect effects of climate change (e.g. promoting a widespread adaptation response). International initiatives (such as the Belmont Forum initiative on Coastal Vulnerability) should be promoted and global environmental change research shared (e.g. within multilateral institutions).

Keywords:

• adaptation
• climate change
• coastal infrastructure
• indirect impacts
• international dimensions
• sea-level rise

Acknowledgements

The research on which this paper is based was funded by the UK Government's Foresight project on the ‘International Dimensions of Climate Change’ (http://www.bis.gov.uk/foresight/our-work/projects/published-projects/international-dimensions-of-climate-change). Specific thanks go to Dr. Wolfgang Kron (Munich Re) for providing us with data in Tables 3 and 4, and to this article's anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments for the improvement of the paper.

Notes

The low elevation coastal zone (LECZ) is the area below an elevation of 10 m, following McGranahan et al. (2007). This is the land area that will be most affected by coastal processes and sea-level rise, directly and indirectly.

Twenty-foot equivalent units.

Many of these are outside the LECZ as they are built on elevated coastal locations.

Tsunamis are not related to climate variability, but tsunami events serve as an analogue for the problems of extreme events, including climatic-driven extreme events.

Note that these are lower bound estimates, as many other impacts including losses of human lives, ecosystem services, cultural heritages, etc. are often difficult to monetize, and are not reflected in economic damage loss estimates.

Note that, for consistency, the data presented here are taken from a common source.

A 2 m rise has a low probability H⁺⁺ sea-level range defined for sensitivity analysis (see Lowe et al., 2009).

Port cities with more than one million people as of 2005.

In order to manage the associated risk, the insurance industry has exerted significant effort into research on major coastal disasters and coastal development (see www.williresearchnetwork.com).

Only adaptation ‘incremental’ costs for climate change, and not the adaptation deficit, are typically considered.

Figure 5 also represents an appropriate synthesis tool that reflects the current level of understanding of this complex problem, in a way that does not overemphasize the quantitative results.

‘H/L’, ‘L/L’ etc. refer to the magnitudes of climate change or success of adaptation.

The Dutch have promoted national expertise in coastal adaptation for the last 20 years, for example by hosting the 1993 World Coast Conference (WCC, 1994) and establishing the Delta Alliance (see www.delta-alliance.org).