Addressing coastal adaptation on the WCRP Sea Level Conference

Deltares experts visited Singapore for the WCRP Sea Level Conference.

Marjolijn Haasnoot, IPCC author and environmental scientist at Deltares, addressed the conference on coastal adaptation, and met with Singapore Minister for Sustainability and the Environment, Grace Fu, and Senior Minister of State Poh-Koon Koh (Dr).

Marjolijn discussed the importance of coastal adaptation to enable living in coastal cities and low-lying deltas, such as The Netherlands and Singapore. She stressed the need to combine, sequence, and plan ahead adaption responses, and to align them with sociocultural values and development priorities. By using Dynamic Adaptation Policy Pathways, adaptation can be broken into manageable steps over time. This allows for accelerated adaptation and learning, as well as low-regret actions to prepare for near-term and long-term options that can be implemented depending on how the future unfolds.

Although sea level rise will continue in the coming centuries, the rate at which this will occur has important implications for the sustainability of low-lying countries such as Singapore and the Netherlands, and will also affect decisions that are taken in the short term.

Marjolijn is joined at the conference by experts JanJaap Brinkman (Co-director of NUSDeltares), Bart van den Hurk and Sanne Muis. During the conference they shared their research on sea level rise adaptation, early warning and modelling of impacts on surge and waves, and will bring home the headline topics for the research agenda for the years to come.