TY - JOUR
T1 - Profiling risk and sustainability in coastal deltas of the world
AU - Tessler, Z. D.
AU - Vörösmarty, C. J.
AU - Grossberg, M.
AU - Gladkova, I.
AU - Aizenman, H.
AU - Syvitski, J. P.M.
AU - Foufoula-Georgiou, E.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science. All rights reserved.
PY - 2015/8/7
Y1 - 2015/8/7
N2 - Deltas are highly sensitive to increasing risks arising from local human activities, land subsidence, regional water management, global sea-level rise, and climate extremes. We quantified changing flood risk due to extreme events using an integrated set of global environmental, geophysical, and social indicators. Although risks are distributed across all levels of economic development, wealthy countries effectively limit their present-day threat by gross domestic product-enabled infrastructure and coastal defense investments. In an energy-constrained future, such protections will probably prove to be unsustainable, raising relative risks by four to eight times in the Mississippi and Rhine deltas and by one-and-a-half to four times in the Chao Phraya and Yangtze deltas. The current emphasis on short-term solutions for the world's deltas will greatly constrain options for designing sustainable solutions in the long term.
AB - Deltas are highly sensitive to increasing risks arising from local human activities, land subsidence, regional water management, global sea-level rise, and climate extremes. We quantified changing flood risk due to extreme events using an integrated set of global environmental, geophysical, and social indicators. Although risks are distributed across all levels of economic development, wealthy countries effectively limit their present-day threat by gross domestic product-enabled infrastructure and coastal defense investments. In an energy-constrained future, such protections will probably prove to be unsustainable, raising relative risks by four to eight times in the Mississippi and Rhine deltas and by one-and-a-half to four times in the Chao Phraya and Yangtze deltas. The current emphasis on short-term solutions for the world's deltas will greatly constrain options for designing sustainable solutions in the long term.
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U2 - 10.1126/science.aab3574
DO - 10.1126/science.aab3574
M3 - Article
C2 - 26250684
AN - SCOPUS:84939216119
SN - 0036-8075
VL - 349
SP - 638
EP - 643
JO - Science
JF - Science
IS - 6248
ER -