YES-27-A-07: Building coastal resilience under a changing climate

Climate change is already affecting the UK through rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, more frequent and intense heat extremes, and increasing risks from flooding and other climate-related hazards. Sea levels around the UK are also rising as a result of ocean warming, melting land-based ice and changes in ocean circulation, increasing the risk of coastal flooding, erosion and saltwater intrusion. These pressures are expected to intensify over coming decades, with higher sea levels compounding the impacts of storm surges and extreme coastal water levels and placing growing pressure on coastal communities, infrastructure, ecosystems and economies. The consequences will vary substantially between locations, depending on local sea-level change, coastal characteristics, patterns of development and the capacity of communities and institutions to adapt. Understanding how these changing risks are perceived, communicated and incorporated into decisions about coastal adaptation will therefore be increasingly important for building resilient UK coastal communities.

In climate change adaptation & risk management, climate and environmental data is used to generate impact estimates which can then be used in economic appraisal frameworks to support long-term investment decisions. When we consider long-term, or chronic, risks of climate change such as sea-level rise and the impact of new climate data on coastal infrastructures, environments and habitats each step of this process comes with significant uncertainties. Despite this, there is little evidence of how these uncertainties should be collectively managed across this decision-making process. This is critical in generating the evidence needed for climate action and for coastal adaptation decisions as this range in uncertainty could be the difference between 10s of billions of pounds of coastal damage or 10s of thousands of homes lost. Unpacking this challenge requires novel approachs with an interdisciplinary perspective to examine how different types of climate information (e.g., probabilitic approaches, storylines, etc.) impact the climate adaptation decision process. The new knowledge this project will generate will support a pathway to improve decision making under deep uncertainty for coastal management.

This PhD will address these research questions:

– How should multiple uncertainties be managed across the data to decision process, in the context of climate and coastal change?

– What impact has the advances in climate/environmental science had in reducing uncertainty in climate risk management?

– How can decision making under deep uncertainty approaches be developed for coastal management under climate and environmental change?

This PhD will need to question/challenge fundamental inputs/outputs of environmental science and climate modelling/forecasting, coastal inundation forecasts and impact assessment, socio-economic scenarios, and current appraisal guidance that included flexibility & uncertainty (e.g. real options/adaptation pathways). A data driven uncertainty quantification framework will be developed and applied to coastal locations (at different decision making levels) to enable analysis of the impact of changes in uncertainty across the whole assessment system (from climate to decision). The East Coast (Lincolnshire & East Yorkshire) has been chosen as a a case-study location for this studentship, as it is a dynamic social-ecological system, representing many UK coasts that have been shaped by post-industrialisation, urbanisation and social deprivation. The team currently includes: Prof. Suraje Dessai – an expert in the management of uncertainties in climate change science; Dr David Dawson – an expert in applied climate adaptation and integration of disciplinary approaches.