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COMMENTARY

Lasting coastal hazards from past greenhouse gas emissions

Tony E. Wonga,1

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The emission of greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere is a by-product of modern marvels such as the production of vast amounts of energy, heating and cooling inhospitable environments to be amenable to human existence, and traveling great distances faster than our saddle-sore ancestors ever dreamed possible. However, these luxuries come at a price: climate changes in the form of severe droughts, extreme precipitation and temperatures, increased frequency of flooding in coastal cities, global warming, and sea-level rise (1, 2). Rising seas pose a severe risk to coastal areas across the globe, with billions of US dollars in assets at risk and about 10% of the world’s population living within 10 m of sea level (3–5). The price of our emissions is not felt immediately throughout the entire climate system, however, because processes such as ice sheet melt and the expansion of warming ocean water act over the course of centuries. Thus, even if all greenhouse gas emissions immediately ceased, our past emissions have already “locked in” some amount of continued global warming and sea-level rise. In PNAS, Nauels et al. (6) examine how greenhouse gas emissions since 1750, and anticipated future emissions, contribute to global sea-level rise.
They find that emissions from 1750 to 1991 have committed us to about 60 cm of additional sea-level rise by the year 2300, relative to the mean from 1986 to 2005, with another 24 cm stemming from greenhouse gases emitted between 1991 and 2016. So, through our emissions thus far in modern human history, we have committed to a total sea-level rise of about 84 cm over the next couple of centuries. This is the price we pay for the luxury of about 200 y of relatively unchecked greenhouse gas emissions. To be clear, past emissions have already been contributing to climate change. The sea-level commitments calculated by Nauels et al. (6) are the sealevel rise that has yet to occur—the balance of our debt.

Extremely likely by
Likely by
2073−2138
2064−2105

RCP2.6 RCP8.5

  • 2020
  • 2040
  • 2060
  • 2080
  • 2100
  • 2120
  • 2140

Year when 50-cm sea-level rise threshold is exceeded

Fig. 1. Cumulative probability of exceeding 50 cm of sea-level rise by year (relative to the global mean sea level from 1986 to 2005). The yellow box denotes the range of years after which exceedance is likely [≥66% probability (12)], where the left boundary follows a business-as-usual emissions scenario (RCP8.5, red line) and the right boundary follows a low-emissions scenario (RCP2.6, blue line). The orange box denotes the range of years after which exceedance is extremely likely [≥95% probability (12)].

The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement represents a landmark cooperative achievement by its participating nations to recognize and address the threat posed by climate change (7). The Paris Agreement sets a goal to limit global warming to 2 °C above preindustrial* temperatures, with a more ambitious target of 1.5 °C. With the aim of achieving these global warming limits, each nation’s planned reductions in greenhouse gas emissions for the years 2016 through 2030 are codified as the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) (8).
Nauels et al. (6) isolate the impacts of past and anticipated future emissions under the Paris Agreement by assuming that each country follows its NDCs from 2016 to 2030 then “shuts off” greenhouse gas

aSchool of Mathematical Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY 14623 Author contributions: T.E.W. analyzed data and wrote the paper. The author declares no competing interest. Published under the PNAS license. See companion article on page 23487. 1Email: [email protected]. First published November 7, 2019. *“Preindustrial” refers to the state of the climate before the invention and widespread adoption of efficient steam engine technology in the late
1700s and is used as a baseline to measure the extent to which the emission of greenhouse gases by human activity is affecting Earth’s climate.

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emissions. They find that emissions following the Paris Agreement would successfully limit warming to within 1.5 °C but lead to about 20 cm of additional sea-level rise, for a total of just over 1 m of sea-level rise commitment by the year 2300. In the nearer-term future, the authors find that previous and planned greenhouse gas emissions as per the NDCs commit us to about 43 cm of sea-level rise by 2100. This raises the question, What are the impacts of 43 cm of sea-level rise around the world?
First, it is important to recognize that these estimates are an aggressively optimistic lower bound, as they do not account for nations exiting the Paris Agreement, or failing to meet their emissions targets, as recent work has found to be the case (9). The committed sea-level rise calculated by Nauels et al. (6) is only the part attributable to past emissions, so any future emissions beyond 2030 will increase their estimates.
To account for a range of possible future emissions, we can use a recent set of temperature and sea-level projections (10) and examine the time frame on which a 50-cm threshold of sea-level rise will probably be exceeded. Approximate bounds on the exceedance timing may be obtained by using 2 scenarios to represent future emissions: Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5, which corresponds roughly to a “business-as-usual” greenhouse gas emissions scenario, and the low-emissions scenario RCP2.6, which is a more gradual real-world analog to the authors’ scenario of zero emissions after 2030 (11). I calculate the probability of exceeding the 50-cm threshold as the proportion of projections in a given year that have exceeded 50 cm of sea-level rise since the period from 1986 to 2005.
Sea-level rise is likely [≥66% probability (12)] to exceed
50 cm by the year 2064 in the high-emissions scenario and by 2105 in the low-emissions scenario (Fig. 1). First, this result corroborates the sea-level commitment from Nauels et al. (6) of 43 cm by 2100. Second, this relates their result to the range of potential future emissions. The edges of the yellow box in Fig. 1 represent the likely time horizon for 50 cm of sea-level rise, assuming either strong emissions reductions (RCP2.6) or little/ no emissions reductions (RCP8.5). These estimates shed light on how the new study’s calculated sea-level commitment drives serious risks to coastal areas because the true future emissions pathway will probably not be as rosy as zero greenhouse gas emissions post-2030.
Nauels et al. (6) offer a clear avenue to safeguard against some underprotection regrets.
Anthoff et al. (17) estimate the damages from sea-level rise thresholds by the year 2100 of 50 cm, 1 m, and 2 m, assuming that nations all protect their coastlines following an economically efficient strategy. For example, both Thailand and the United Kingdom incur damages upward of $2 billion as a result of 50 cm of sea-level rise (17), but the gross domestic product of the United Kingdom is about 5 times that of Thailand (18). With 1 m of sea-level rise by 2100 [well within the range of current estimates (19)], Mozambique, the Bahamas, Palau, and Micronesia all suffer damages exceeding 1% of each nation’s gross domestic product (17).

In PNAS, Nauels et al. examine how greenhouse gas emissions since 1750, and anticipated future emissions, contribute to global sea-level rise.

These damages should also be read as an “optimistic” lower bound. Countries that fail to meet their NDC emissions goals or opt out altogether rack up additional climate debt, to be repaid disproportionately by smaller, low-lying coastal nations. The NDCs allow the authors to isolate the portions of sea-level commitment that are attributable to each nation’s pledged emissions. They find that emissions from the period 2016 to 2030 by the top 5 emitters alone (China, the United States, the European Union, India, and Russia) are responsible for committing the world to about 12 cm of sea-level rise, out of a total commitment from that period of 20 cm. The asymmetry between the countries emitting the most greenhouse gases and those who suffer the consequences is striking.
A key lesson we can take from Nauels et al. (6) is that we have already put into the atmosphere greenhouse gases sufficient to exceed the 50-cm and 1-m sea-level rise thresholds; it is only a matter of when. With billions of dollars and millions of lives at stake, guarding against future damages is the economically and ethically prudent decision. These results highlight the need to adapt coastal areas to guard against future sea-level rise, among other climate risks. Indeed, if we neglect to adapt coastal areas to protect against future sea-level rise, damages may be amplified by more than 3-fold (17).
The findings of Nauels et al. (6) make it clear that aggressive and immediate mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions is critical for avoiding severe climate damages. Even if emissions drop to zero after 2030, the specter of past emissions looms large as global temperatures will continue to warm for a few years and sea levels continue to rise for more than a century, leading to billions of dollars in damages. To wait any longer to drastically reduce emissions decreases the reliability of achieving the Paris Agreement limits on global warming. Within about a decade, the desired limits are no longer feasible (20). At present, the most important decisions we can make are to 1) reduce near-term greenhouse gas emissions, even beyond what is pledged in the Paris Agreement, to mitigate damage from future emissions and 2) provide the necessary support and infrastructure to prepare coastal areas for—at the very least—the committed sea-level rise from past emissions. Failure to do so endangers millions of vulnerable people and wastes billions of dollars due to excessive damages from underprotection. We put those greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and it is time to pay the piper.
Thus, the sea-level commitments reported by Nauels et al.
(6) can serve as a lower bound on future sea-level rise and an upper bound on the time horizon on which thresholds of sealevel rise will be exceeded. This type of imprecise probabilistic information is still quite useful from the perspective of a coastal decision maker. It is no secret that climate projections are deeply uncertain, which in turn leads to deep uncertainty in assessments of coastal flood risk (13). This can lead to decision paralysis while decision and policy makers contemplate the variety of information presented to them (14). Regret can come in 2 forms: underprotection, leading to needlessly high losses, and overprotection, such as overspending on adaptation measures. An economically efficient protection strategy balances over- versus underprotection. Often, this is chosen to minimize total expected damages (15), but other measures of risk can be optimized too (16). Knowledge of a lower bound on anticipated risks provides decision makers with a minimum level of protection needed to guard against those risks. In this way,

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1 J. A. Church et al., “Sea level change” in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, T. Stocker et al., Eds. (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
2 S. I. Seneviratne et al., “Changes in climate extremes and their impacts on the natural physical environment” in Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and

Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation: Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, C. B. Field, et al., Eds. (Cambridge

University Press, 2012), pp. 109–230.
3 G. McGranahan, D. Balk, B. Anderson, The rising tide: Assessing the risks of climate change and human settlements in low elevation coastal zones. Environ. Urban.
19, 17–37 (2007).
4 S. Hanson et al., A global ranking of port cities with high exposure to climate extremes. Clim. Change 104, 89–111. (2011). 5 J. Hinkel et al., Coastal flood damage and adaptation costs under 21st century sea-level rise. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 111, 3292–3297 (2014). 6 A. Nauels, et al., Attributing long-term sea-level rise to Paris Agreement emission pledges. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116, 23487–23492 (2019). 7 C. J. Rhodes, The 2015 Paris climate change conference: COP21. Sci. Prog. 99, 97–104 (2016). 8 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Aggregate effect of the intended nationally determined contributions: An update. https://unfccc.int/ resource/docs/2016/cop22/eng/02.pdf. Accessed 11 October 2019.
9 D. G. Victor et al., Prove Paris was more than paper promises. Nature 548, 25–27 (2017).
10 B. Vega-Westhoff, R. L. Sriver, C. A. Hartin, T. E. Wong, K. Keller, Impacts of observational constraints related to sea level on estimates of climate sensitivity. Earths
Futur. 7, 677–690 (2019).
11 R. H. Moss et al., The next generation of scenarios for climate change research and assessment. Nature 463, 747–756 (2010).

12 M. D. Mastrandrea et al., Guidance note for lead authors of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report on Consistent Treatment of Uncertainties (Intergovernmental Panel

on Climate Change, 2010).
13 T. E. Wong, K. Keller, Deep uncertainty surrounding coastal flood risk projections: A case study for New Orleans. Earths Futur. 5, 1015–1026 (2017). 14 R. Lempert, Scenarios that illuminate vulnerabilities and robust responses. Clim. Change 117, 627–646 (2013). 15 D. van Dantzig, Economic decision problems for flood prevention. Econometrica 24, 276–287 (1956). 16 D. McInerney, R. Lempert, K. Keller, What are robust strategies in the face of uncertain climate threshold responses?: Robust climate strategies. Clim. Change 112,
547–568 (2012).
17 D. Anthoff, R. J. Nicholls, R. S. J. Tol, The economic impact of substantial sea-level rise. Mitig. Adapt. Strategies Glob. Change 15, 321–335 (2010). 18 The World Bank, GDP (current US$). https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD. Accessed 12 October 2019. 19 G. Le Cozannet, J. C. Manceau, J. Rohmer, Bounding probabilistic sea-level projections within the framework of the possibility theory. Environ. Res. Lett. 12,
014012 (2017).
20 K. Keller, A. Robinson, D. F. Bradford, M. Oppenheimer, The regrets of procrastination in climate policy. Environ. Res. Lett. 2, 024004 (2007).

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    102 STUDY Analysis Climate change, Debt and COVID-19 Analysing the Triple Crisis with a New Climate Disaster and Debt Risk Indicator and Building Forward for a Resilient Recovery, Based on Climate Justice Imprint Publisher Brot für die Welt Evangelisches Werk für Diakonie und Entwicklung e. V. Caroline-Michaelis-Straße 1 10115 Berlin Phone: +49 30 65211 0 [email protected] www.brot-fuer-die-welt.de Lead Author Thomas Hirsch (Climate and Development Advice) With contributions from Eva Hanfstängl and Sabine Minninger (Bread for the World); Jürgen Kaiser (erlassjahr.de); Vera Hampel and Miklós Veszprémi (Climate and Development Advice); Kerstin Pfliegner, Joanna Smith and Helena Sims (The Nature Conservancy); Sara Jane Ahmed (Finance Advisor at the Global Centre on Adaptation); Vera Künzel and Laura Schäfer (Germanwatch); Elena Cedillo and Sophie Gebreyes (Lutheran World Federation); Marivone Vorachak (Cooperation Committee with Laos); Maina Talia (Climate justice consultant, Tuvalu) Editor Sven Recker This publication contains guest articles that are in the sole responsibility of the guest authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bread for the World and erlassjahr.de Responsible according to German Press Law Klaus Seitz Photos Jens Grossmann (title: Debris in front of the Bethany Hospital in the City of Tacloban City in Leyte/Philippines due to the devastating damages Typhoon Hayian caused in 2013./p. 42), Christof Krackhardt (p. 23), Karin Schermbrucker (p. 16), SIGA (p. 9), Sara Jane Ahmed (p. 32), Sophie Gebreyes (p. 51), Manivone Vorachak (p. 63), Maina Talia (p. 69), Elena Cedillo (p. 76) Layout Katja Tränkner (Write Now) Art.