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Risks of Sea Level Rise to Disadvantaged Communities in the United States
Citation:
Risks of Sea Level Rise to Disadvantaged Communities in the United States.
Impact/Purpose:
To identify geographic areas in the contiguous United States that may be more likely to experience disproportionate impacts of SLR, and to determine if and where socially vulnerable populations would bear disproportionate costs of adaptation.
Description:
In this paper, we apply a new analytic tool to identify geographic areas in the contiguous United States that may be more likely to experience disproportionate impacts of sea level rise (SLR), and to determine if and where socially vulnerable populations would bear disproportionate costs of adaptation. We use the Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI) to identify socially vulnerable coastal communities, and combine this with output from a SLR coastal property model that evaluates threats of inundation and the economic efficiency of adaptation approaches to respond to those threats. Our results demonstrate the importance of considering the equity and environmental justice implications of SLR in climate change policy analysis and coastal adaptation planning.
