Integrated Impacts of Climate Change-Induced Sea Level Rise in Metro Boston and Adaptation Strategies

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the most credible global organization analyzing research on long-term climate change, stated that, "an increasing body of observations gives a collective picture of a warming world and other changes in the climate system" due to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. One of the impacts of this is rising sea levels due to melting of glaciers and polar ice caps and thermal expansion of the ocean; this is referred to as eustatic sea level rise (SLR). Sea levels are also rising because of land subsidence independent of the changing climate. Our research focuses on the possible impacts of SLR in the coastal area of metropolitan Boston in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in the northeastern United States of America (USA). The present 500 year coastal floodplain of the region contains parts of 32 municipalities. The 500 year coastal floodplain is the area that has a probability of 1/500 or 0.2 percent each year of being flooded by ocean storm surges due to tropical (i.e. hurricanes) and extratropical (i.e. northeasters) storms. This means that, on the average, this entire coastal area is flooded once every 500 years. Land areas at lower elevations are flooded more frequently. The coastal floodplain is approximately 12,000 hectares.