(Commonwealth Union)_To increase the durability of infrastructure against rising sea levels, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) suggests increasing the imaginary waterline boundary for projects in the Asia Pacific area from one metre to two metres. According to an ADB report distributed during the bank’s annual board meeting (26–30 September), the Asia–Pacific region could experience sea level rise of more than two metres by 2100 as a result of both warming oceans brought on by climate change and sinking land primarily because of groundwater withdrawal.
The paper makes use of hundreds of years’ worth of geological and hydrographic information. The majority of the Pacific Island region’s islands are sinking, according to data that has been gathered since 2000. The study concluded that where the ground is sinking, the impact of sea level rise will be more pronounced.
Professor of hydro-climatology at the University of Newcastle in Australia and the study’s author, Anthony Kiem, claim that sea level rise in the Asia Pacific area would likely exacerbate the effects of climate change and put new and current important infrastructure at risk. In a report on managing infrastructure risk associated with sea level rise in Pacific Island nations, published in February by the Pacific Region Infrastructure Facility, Kiem served as an external technical reviewer.
The report stated that the Pacific Island Countries would continue to face difficulties due to the long-term expectation that sea levels will continue to rise. Although certain paleoclimate records indicate that sea levels have risen by five meters in a century previously, the consensus is that such a dramatic rise would take hundreds or millennia to occur and is unlikely to happen before 2100, according to the research. ADB has advised countries to make appropriate modifications to the infrastructure they plan to develop in light of data concerning increases in sea levels expected in the Asia-Pacific by 2100.
“A scenario of 0.5 metre by 2050 for short- to medium-term projects (i.e., with a design life of 20 to 30 years); a scenario of two metres by 2100 for long-term; and scenarios of greater than two metres for projects with an estimated lifetime beyond 2100,” the report stated. “The Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other work that have emerged since AR5 [the previous assessment] demonstrate that not only is sea level rise greater than one meter (relative to the 1995-2014 baseline) conceivable at some point in the 21st century but it is also likely,” it added.
