Sea Level Rise and Its Risk Management

Sea level rise is among the most severe societal consequences of anthropogenic climate change. Significant advance has been achieved in recent years in the study of future sea level rise and its risk management practice: ①Sea level rise is considered as a kind of hazard,its future plausible scenarios and their probabilities are necessary to be predicted and estimated,and the upper limit with very low probability and high consequences should be emphasized. For this purpose,a complete probability distribution framework has been developed to predict the scenarios and probabilities of future sea level rise with Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) in recent years. ② For a high emissions scenario,it was found that Antarctic Ice Sheet might make a contribution to Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL) rise as high as 78150 cm (mean value 114 cm) by 2100. For the same scenario,the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report gave an Antarctic contribution of only -8+14 cm (mean value 4 cm). ③ Recent studies recommended a revised worst-case (Extreme) GMSL rise scenario of 2.5 m from previous 2.0 m by 2100. It is recognized that GMSL rise will not stop at 2100; rather,it will continue to rise for centuries afterwards,but the degree of uncertainty related to sea level rise will increase. ④ Approaches of combining the upper-bound scenario and a central estimate or mid-range scenario, Adaptation Pathways and robust decision-making are developed to provide a set of long-term planning envelope. These decision-making methods are used widely in coastal risk management related to future sea level rise. Sea level rise and its risk management need to enhance monitoring,analysis and simulation to predict the global,regional and local seal level rise scenarios and the probabilities with different time scales,reduce the estimate uncertainty, assess its upper limits, and enhance decision methods and their application under deep uncertain, in order to meet the needs of climate change adaptation planning,decision-making and long-term risk management in coastal regions.