Science
2 May 2014 vol 344, issue 6183, pages 441-548
http://www.sciencemag.org/current.dtl
Policy Forum
Climate Adaptation
Evaluating Flood Resilience Strategies for Coastal Megacities
Jeroen C. J. H. Aerts1,*, W. J. Wouter Botzen1, Kerry Emanuel2, Ning Lin3, Hans de Moel1,
Erwann O. Michel-Kerjan4,*
Author Affiliations
1Institute for Environmental Studies, VU University, 1081HV, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
2Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
3Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
4Center for Risk Management and Operations and Information Management Department, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Recent flood disasters in the United States (2005, 2008, 2012); the Philippines (2012, 2013); and Britain (2014) illustrate how vulnerable coastal cities are to storm surge flooding (1). Floods caused the largest portion of insured losses among all catastrophes around the world in 2013 (2). Population density in flood-prone coastal zones and megacities is expected to grow by 25% by 2050; projected climate change and sea level rise may further increase the frequency and/or severity of large-scale floods (3–7).