Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new research, threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal cities, Eurasia Diary reported citing foeign media.
The authors of a paper published Tuesday developed a more accurate way of calculating land elevation based on satellite readings, a standard way of estimating the effects of sea level rise over large areas, and found that the previous numbers were far too optimistic. The new research shows that some 150 million people are now living on land that will be below the high-tide line by midcentury.
Southern Vietnam could all but disappear.
More than 20 million people in Vietnam, almost one quarter of the population, live on land that will be inundated.
Much of Ho Chi Minh City, the nation’s economic centre, would disappear with it, according to the research, which was produced by Climate Central, a science organization based in New Jersey, and published in the journal Nature Communications. The projections don’t account for future population growth or land lost to coastal erosion.
Standard elevation measurements using satellites struggle to differentiate the true ground level from the tops of trees or buildings, said Scott A. Kulp, a researcher at Climate Central and one of the paper’s authors. So he and Benjamin Strauss, Climate Central’s chief executive, used artificial intelligence to determine the error rate and correct for it.
In Thailand, more than 10 per cent of citizens now live on land that is likely to be inundated by 2050, compared with just 1 per cent according to the earlier technique. The political and commercial capital, Bangkok, is particularly imperilled.
Climate change will put pressure on cities in multiple ways, said Loretta Hieber Girardet, a Bangkok resident and United Nations disaster risk-reduction official. Even as global warming floods more places, it will also push poor farmers off the land to seek work in cities.
“It is a dire formula,” she said.
In Shanghai, one of Asia’s most important economic engines, water threatens to consume the heart of the city and many other cities around it.
