Tools for Predicting and Mitigating Coastal Hazard and Climate Change Impacts

Tools for modeling coastal hazard impacts and assessing the vulnerability of communities and ecosystems to these impacts include:

Modeling coastal hazard impacts

  • ASA’s Inundation Toolbox predicts coastal inundation by applying storm surge model predictions to local topography datasets to generate maps of areas at risk of inundation from predicted surge.  This is an in-house tool, and users must work with ASA on projects.
  • SLOSH (US only) estimates storm surge heights and winds resulting from actual and possible hurricanes. The model is run by the U.S. National Hurricane Center, and graphical output is provided.

Assessing and mitigating vulnerability to coastal hazard impacts

  • Risk and Vulnerability Assessment Tool provides a process for conducting hazard identification, social and environmental vulnerability, and mitigation opportunity analyses as well as a storm surge visualization tool.
  • HAZUS-MH (US only) estimates physical damage, economic losses, and social impacts from floods, hurricane winds and earthquakes.    Potential loss estimates include physical damage to critical facilities and infrastructure; economic losses; and social impacts such as population exposed to hazards.
  • Land Use Portfolio Model links financial portfolio theory with natural hazard, land use, mitigation and emergency preparedness information to estimate risk to a community from natural disasters at the regional scale and identify cost-effective risk reduction policies.
  • Hazard Assessment Tools help users quickly identify potential hazards for a location.    Users search for locations by address or owner name or clicking in the map, and the tools query hazards data to determine hazards zones for the location. This functionality is available in template form and can be set up for any location with the required data and resources.

Many of these tools above are also useful for assessing vulnerability to potential climate change impacts. Additional tools for modeling climate change impacts and assessing the vulnerability of communities and ecosystems to these impacts include:

Modeling climate change impacts

  • Climate Wizard provides easy-to-use, web-based visualization for historic and predicted temperature and rainfall maps worldwide.
  • MAGICC and SCENGEN are coupled tools for investigating climate change and its uncertainties at global and regional levels. MAGICC predicts changes in greenhouse gas concentrations, temperature, and sea level resulting from anthropogenic emissions. SCENGEN uses these results to produce spatially detailed information on future changes in temperature, precipitation and mean sea level.
  • Climate Assessment Tool (US only) works with the BASINS 4.0 watershed modeling system to modify historical weather data to create climate change scenarios for assessing the influence of climate variability and change on water quantity and quality.
  • SLAMM simulates the dominant processes in wetland conversion and shoreline modification during long-term sea level rise and predicts wetland distributions under accelerated sea level rise.

Assessing and mitigating vulnerability to climate change impacts

  • CRiSTAL helps planners and managers understand links between livelihoods and climate in their project areas, assess a project’s impact on community-level adaptive capacity, and adjust projects to increase adaptive capacity and reduce vulnerability to climate change.
  • SimCLIM helps assess the impacts of and adaptations to climate variability and change including extreme events and sea-level rise.

Coastal hazard and climate change modeling and vulnerability assessment tools can also be interoperated to provide powerful decision support tools that address multiple EBM objectives.  A great example is the Coastal Resilience Web Mapping Tool that has been developed for Long Island, New York (USA) by a coalition led by The Nature Conservancy.  This tool uses SLOSH, the Community Vulnerability Assessment Tool (part of the Risk and Vulnerability Assessment Tool), HAZUS, and additional GIS analyses to address both coastal hazard mitigation and conservation goals for the region.  The tool helps local officials and coastal managers design, build, and discuss potential scenarios for sea level rise, storm surge, community vulnerability, and conservation. It then helps them identify solutions that meet both ecosystem protection and community resilience goals.

Additional resources for learning about coastal hazards and climate change, including data sources for tools and examples of coastal risk and vulnerability assessments, are:

Many thanks to EBM Tools Network listserve participants for their contributions to this Tool FAQ.