Profiling risk and sustainability in coastal deltas of the world
Deltas are growing centers of risk
Population growth, urbanization, and rising sea levels are placing populations living in delta regions under increased risk. The future resiliency and potential for adaptation by these populations depend on a number of socioeconomic and geophysical factors. Tessler et al. examined 48 deltas from around the globe to assess changes in regional vulnerability (see the Perspective by Temmerman). Some deltas in countries with a high gross domestic product will be initially more resilient to these changes, because they can perform expensive maintenance on infrastructure. However, short-term policies will become unsustainable if unaccompanied by long-term investments in all delta regions.
Abstract
Deltas are highly sensitive to increasing risks arising from local human activities, land subsidence, regional water management, global sea-level rise, and climate extremes. We quantified changing flood risk due to extreme events using an integrated set of global environmental, geophysical, and social indicators. Although risks are distributed across all levels of economic development, wealthy countries effectively limit their present-day threat by gross domestic product–enabled infrastructure and coastal defense investments. In an energy-constrained future, such protections will probably prove to be unsustainable, raising relative risks by four to eight times in the Mississippi and Rhine deltas and by one-and-a-half to four times in the Chao Phraya and Yangtze deltas. The current emphasis on short-term solutions for the world’s deltas will greatly constrain options for designing sustainable solutions in the long term.
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Supplementary Material
Summary
Materials and Methods
Figs. S1 to S4
Tables S1 to S3
Resources
File (aab3574-tessler-sm.pdf)
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Published In
Science
Volume 349 | Issue 6248
7 August 2015
7 August 2015
Copyright
Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 15 April 2015
Accepted: 30 June 2015
Published in print: 7 August 2015
Acknowledgments
Data are available as supplementary materials on Science Online. This work was supported by NASA (Land Cover/Land Use Change Program grant NNX12AD28G) and NSF (Belmont Forum Coastal Vulnerability awards 1343458 and 1342944, and Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems award 1115025). The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors thank B. Fekete and P. Green for helpful comments on the manuscript.
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