A new modeling approach can help researchers, policymakers and the public better understand how policy decisions will influence human migration as sea levels rise across the globe, suggests a paper published on Tuesday, Nov. 26, in Nature Climate Change.
A new modeling approach can help researchers, policymakers and the public better understand how policy decisions will influence human migration as sea levels rise across the globe, suggests a paper published on Tuesday, Nov. 26, in Nature Climate Change.
The study indicates that global policy decisions about greenhouse gas emissions, and a range of policy decisions that determine where people live and work in coastal areas, will determine whether people need to migrate as a result of sea level rise and where they may go — and the best way to weigh the potential effects of these policies is to build new climate change models, computer-generated predictions of how and when global temperatures and landscapes will change.
“This paper homes in on policy as the key to managing climate change impacts,” said Elizabeth Fussell, a contributor to the paper and an associate professor of population studies (research) at Brown University’s Population Studies and Training Center. “Analyzing the effects of current and potential policies on sea-level rise can bring real data, real investigations and real analyses to the table in political discussions that will shape our future.”
The report comes from Fussell and 19 other members of an international research network assembled by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center at the University of Maryland. The network comprises global experts on sea level rise and environment-related migration from the U.S., the United Kingdom and Europe.
Read more at Brown University
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