Creeping disaster along the U.S. coastline: Understanding exposure to sea level rise and hurricanes through historical development.

ABSTRACT: Current estimates of U.S. property at risk of coastal hazards and sea level rise (SLR) are staggering-evaluated at over a trillion U.S. dollars. Despite being enormous in the aggregate, potential losses due to SLR depend on mitigation, adaptation, and exposure and are highly uneven in their distribution across coastal cities. We provide the first analysis of how changes in exposure (how and when) have unfolded over more than a century of coastal urban development in the United States. We do so by leveraging new historical settlement layers from the Historical Settlement Data Compilation for the U.S. (HISDAC-US) to examine building patterns within and between the SLR zones of the conterminous United States since the early twentieth century. Our analysis reveals that SLR zones developed fast

SUBMITTER: Braswell AE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9348716 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature