Climate Change and Small Island Developing States Thomas, Adelle; Baptiste, April; Martyr-Koller, Rosanne ...
Annual review of environment and resources,
10/2020, Volume:
45, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Despite their heterogeneity, small island developing states (SIDS) are recognized as being particularly at risk to climate change, and, as they share numerous common traits, the United Nations ...recognizes them as a special group. SIDS have been quite vocal in calling attention to the challenges they face from climate change and advocating for greater international ambition to limit global warming. Here, we unpack factors that are helpful in understanding the relationship between climate change and SIDS through a review of studies that span disciplines and methodologies. We assess patterns of hazards, exposure, and vulnerability; impacts and risks; awareness and knowledge; adaptation planning and implementation; mitigation; loss and damage; and climate justice to provide an overarching review of literature on climate change and SIDS.
•Climate change is inflicting economic and non-economic loss and damage in small islands states today.•The Comprehensive Risk Management Framework is a tool to assess, reduce and transfer risk, but ...loss and damage can still be incurred.•Recent advances in sea level rise research reveal greater impact of sea-level rise on coastal populations that originally estimated.•Adaptation to SLR is of paramount importance for SIDS, but multiple barriers exist and limits will be reached for SIDS if warming exceeds 1.5°C.•Non-economic losses in human life, biodiversity, and cultural heritage still need to be included in risk management frameworks.
Sea-level rise poses a significant threat to Small Island Developing States (SIDS) due to the concentration of people, assets, and infrastructure in coastal zones. This review assesses literature on key emerging topics in sea level rise including: the lasting impact of near-term mitigation on long-term sea-level rise; new global coastal vertical elevation data and their impact on existing sea-level rise projections; and the interaction of sea-level rise with other hazards, including salinization, tropical cyclones and extreme precipitation. We characterize the regional nature of sea-level rise for SIDS and highlight associated impacts and risks. Finally, we review approaches to address sea-level rise as well as limits to adaptation and resultant economic and non-economic loss and damage that may be experienced by SIDS.
Compound flooding, resulting from a combination of riverine and coastal processes, is a complex but important hazard to resolve along urbanized shorelines in the vicinity of river mouths. However, ...inland flooding models rarely consider oceanographic conditions, and vice versa for coastal flood models. Here, we describe the development of an operational, integrated coastal-watershed flooding model to address this issue of compound flooding in a highly urbanized estuarine environment, San Francisco Bay (CA, USA), where the surrounding communities are susceptible to flooding along the bay shoreline and inland rivers and creeks that drain to the bay. The integrated tributary-coastal forecast model (Hydro-Coastal Storm Modeling System, or Hydro-CoSMoS) was developed to provide water managers and other users with flood forecast information beyond what is currently available. Results presented here are focused on the interaction of the Napa River watershed and the San Pablo Bay at the northern end of San Francisco Bay. This paper describes the modeling setup, the scenario used in a tabletop exercise (TTE), and the assessment of the various flood forecast information products. Hydro-CoSMoS successfully demonstrated the capability to provide watershed and coastal flood information at scales and locations where no such information is currently available and was also successful in showing how tributary flows could be used to inform the coastal storm model during a flooding scenario. The TTE provided valuable feedback on how to guide continued model development and to inform what model outputs and formats are most useful to end-users.
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