Sea Level Rise and Coastal Erosion
Hundreds of millions of people live below the level the sea is heading for.
Severity score
69.1
Critical · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
Thermal expansion and ice sheet loss are raising sea levels at an accelerating rate. Salinisation of farmland and aquifers arrives well before permanent inundation, and low-lying delta populations in Bangladesh, Egypt, Vietnam and small island states are most exposed. Committed rise continues for centuries regardless of future emissions.
Score breakdown
Each factor is a 0–100 relative severity index, not the raw figure or a specific time period. The actual counts and periods are listed under "Standardized Impact" on the right.
Loss of life
24Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
86People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
92Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
88Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
88Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.
Audit trail
Everything this entry has been through — when it was first searched for, queued, reviewed and approved, and how its figures and rank have moved since.
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