Imagine your home or your place of employment get flooded. Not only some days a year, but every day of the year. Will you sell your car and buy a boat to travel to work? What else will happen? Whole cities relocate from basement to attic, public transport regulated by maritime law, reinstallation of municipal waste water and electrical power supply. Will you adapt and pay for a living in water world?
All coast areas are under menace of sea level rise. Our planet’s ice caps store enough water to rise sea level by 70 meters, this scenario is dramatic, but already happened in the past.
Latest IPCC Climate Change report calculated up to 60 centimeters this century caused by melting glaciers and thermal expansion. Because scientific understanding of dynamic changes in Antarctic and Greenland is low any estimations are excluded from this report. Which means it will be definitly more.
Nearly every second inhabitant is living at the seashore. Eight of the ten largest megacities in the world are located by the coast. In a recently published working paper the World Bank combined population and elevation data to find out what are the consequences of 1 meter of sea level rise (SLR):
Our results reveal that hundreds of millions of people in the developing world are likely to be displaced by SLR within this century; and accompanying economic and ecological damage will be severe for many.
At the country level, results are extremely skewed, with severe impacts limited to a relatively small number of countries. For these countries (e.g., Vietnam, A.R. of Egypt, and The Bahamas), however, the consequences of SLR are potentially catastrophic.
More:
epa.gov: Sea Level Rise Reports
unfpa.org: State of world population
worldbank.org: The impact of sea level rise on developing countries : a comparative analysis
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