Sea level rise may impose substantial economic costs to coastal communities worldwide, but characterizing its global impact remains challenging because SLR costs depend heavily on natural characteristics and human investments at each location – including topography, the spatial distribution of assets, and local adaptation decisions. To date, several impact models have been developed to estimate the global costs of SLR. Yet, the limited availability of open-source and modular platforms that easily ingest up-to-date socioeconomic and physical data sources restricts the ability of existing systems to incorporate new insights transparently. In this paper, we present a modular, open-source platform designed to address this need, providing end-to-end transparency from global input data to a scalable least-cost optimization framework that estimates adaptation and net SLR costs for nearly 10 000 global coastline segments and administrative regions.

This study develops a method to estimate past, present, and future flood risk for all properties in the conterminous United States whether affected by river, coastal or rainfall flooding.

Future sea level rise (SLR) poses serious threats to the viability of coastal communities, but continues to be challenging to project using deterministic modeling approaches. Nonetheless, adaptation strategies urgently require quantification of future SLR uncertainties, particularly upper-end estimates. Structured expert judgement (SEJ) has proved a valuable approach for similar problems. Our findings, using SEJ, produce probability distributions with long upper tails that are influenced by interdependencies between processes and ice sheets. We find that a global total SLR exceeding 2 m by 2100 lies within the 90% uncertainty bounds for a high emission scenario. This is more than twice the upper value put forward by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the Fifth Assessment Report.

This study links a framework for global and local sea-level rise projections with simulations of two major mechanisms by which climate change can affect the vast Antarctic ice sheet. It shows that future sea level rise may be more than previously thought, but just how much won’t become evident until after mid-century.

The amplification of flood frequencies by sea level rise (SLR) is expected to become one of the most economically damaging impacts of climate change for many coastal locations.

Global set of local sea-level projections to inform decisions on timescales ranging from the coming decades through the 22nd century with complete probability distributions, informed by a combination of expert community assessment, expert elicitation, and process modeling.

Estimates the extent of adaptation to tropical cyclones (TCs) using the global cross-section of countries and finds that countries with more intense TC climates suffer lower marginal losses from an actual TC event, indicating that adaptation to this climatological risk occurs but that it is costly.