More water, less land

By David Bagnall

We've heard much about rising sea levels around the globe and the troubling fi gures which point to 2100 as a bench mark. Whilst they are indeed troubling, 2100 always seems far off, almost of no concern to those of us who are living today: it's certainly unlikely that we today would be around then, so why should we care?

If you have adopted that way of thinking, perhaps the maps that show areas at risk of coastal fl ooding by 2050. Recent research has shown that huge swathes of the British, and global, coastline data was incorrect, causing the global average coastal land height to be on approdimately two meters higher than they are in reality. This means that many who live along the coast live vertically closer to the sea then was fi rst believed. When considering something which is beginning to be as consuming as the ocean is, two meters is a huge amount.

However, more pressing than the direct affects of the 3.6 mm annual sea level rise, and certainly more destructive to many more people in the UK, is the effects this has on areas that are at risk of coastal fl ooding.

The maps shown on these two pages relay the areas that are deemed now to be at risk of coastal fl ooding by the year 2050. These are conservative estimates taken from Climate Central, a non-profi t focussed around sea level change. Large areas of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire are predicted to be below annual coastal fl ood level by 2050, including an area the size of London spanning nearly 70 km in-land. This represents hundreds of thousands of homeless British people.

Other than a statistical error, how does this have anything to do with climate change? The answer to that is in two parts. Firstly, and most obviously, the sea will be higher and therefore able to reach more land internally. Secondly, the affects of climate change also spread to more adverse weather and violent storms. The second of these two is the most important when looking at these maps.

Over the past 50 years, a disaster related to weather, climate or flooding has occurred every day on average, causing US$ 202 million in losses each, according to a report from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). The report also expressed that these disasters have increased fi ve fold over the same 50 year period, and whilst some of this has to be due to better reporting abilities, the vast majority is due to to climate change; a trend we are now at higher risk of in the UK.