This week we would like to share with you the clever Coastal Risk Screening Tool by Climate Central(1), where you can simulate sea level rise and coastal flood risk around the world, based on the latest sea-level projections(2).
In the Coastal Risk Screening Tool, you can choose from a list of maps to view areas at risk by year, water level, temperature, ice sheets or affordable housing. In the map, being powered by Google Earth engine, you can find your location of interest in the search bar. Furthermore, the maps allow to customise many of its inputs so that you can view sea level rise projections across time for multiple pollution and flood level scenarios.
We tried the tool and came to some shocking insights for our country of residence (Belgium): First of all, we selected the areas at risk by year and explored sea level rise for the year 2030, since that timeframe is easy to grasp. Next, we changed some more settings:
- The flood projection setting is the scientific projection of future local sea levels. To these levels common floods of different risk such as annual flood, moderate flood and major flood levels can be added. We included the annual flood for our simulation.
- The next slider helped us select pollution scenario’s allowing to look at different levels of carbon pollution affecting sea level rise. Several scenarios are available: deep and rapid carbon cuts, moderate cuts and unchecked pollution. Currently our emissions most closely match the unchecked pollution scenario, which we therefore selected.
- The final slider is ‘luck’, referring to the fact that the sea level rise models provide a range of possible outcomes. You can move the slider from ‘good luck’ meaning you look at the low end of the possible sea level rise range to ‘bad luck’ meaning you take into account the high end of possible sea level rise. We picked good luck and the tool calculated us following map:
The above projections makes you wonder if current investments in Flanders (Belgium), such as the Oosterweel link completing the Antwerp Ring Road and aiming at improving traffic flow are making any sense at all. Especially because the works consist of channel tunnels and will continue until 2030.
Or, if the above sea level rise and flood projection become reality in the next years, will the PFOS contamination of the ground around the 3M factory in Zwijndrecht solve itself? Should we expect population movements from the west to the east within our country?
We would like to invite you to explore the tool for yourself!
(1) Climate Central is an independent organisation of leading scientists and journalists researching and reporting the facts about climate changing and its impact on the public.
(2) including the recently released Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – read our Guide trough treaties and conventions here.