Impact of Sea-Level/Land-Level Change on Society

Prediction of the magnitude, timing, and severity of human influence on climate is elusive, but considerable effort has been spent identifying geographic areas and natural processes that are sensitive to climate change. Studies of impacts have been performed for different scenarios of climate change and have focused on the vulnerability of individual regions. Although useful for sensitivity analysis, these approaches are limited because they commonly neglect the full suite of physics associated with climate change. For instance, sea-level rise, the primary concern here, is assumed to inundate coastal regions with little if any consideration for self-maintenance processes such as longshore and cross-shore sediment transport or dynamics of barrier beaches. Essentially, the uncertainties for predicting climate change are compounded by the uncertainties in the modeling of impacts given that climate change. However, a broad range of climate-change impacts can be discussed with some degree of certainty, including some effects of possible increased rate of relative sea-level rise.