Research to be published tomorrow in the journal Nature Communications is the first study to quantify the costs of storm damage caused by sea level rise driven specifically by human-induced climate change.
Research to be published tomorrow in the journal Nature Communications is the first study to quantify the costs of storm damage caused by sea level rise driven specifically by human-induced climate change. Researchers from Stevens Institute of Technology, Climate Central, Rutgers University and other institutions found this self-inflicted damage to be $8.1 billion of Hurricane Sandy’s damage and an additional 71,000 people and 36,000 homes exposed to Sandy’s flooding.
Hurricane Sandy struck the northeast U.S. coast in 2012, causing widespread destruction estimated at $62.7 billion. This new research not only reveals that 13 percent of the total damages resulted from human-caused sea level rise, but also reports novel modeling techniques that can be applied to other coastal storms to determine the cost associated with human-caused warming of the planet.
“This study is the first to isolate the human-contributed sea level rise effects during a coastal storm and put a dollar sign to the additional flooding damage,” said Philip Orton, research associate professor at Stevens and a co-author of the study. “With coastal flooding increasingly impacting communities and causing widespread destruction, pinpointing the financial toll and the lives affected by climate change will hopefully add urgency to our efforts to reduce it.”
Read more at Stevens Institute of Technology
Photo Credit: krisr1 via Pixabay
