There are a few different ways to think about which cities will suffer the most from flooding caused by future sea-level rise. A developing capital like Abidjan in the Ivory Coast is located on a particularly susceptible coastline of Africa. But a wealthy city like Miami has some of its most expensive real estate already sitting in the way of the rising tide.
So where do these cities really stand relative to each other, as they face a shared threat from climate change? Or, put another way, who needs to start pouring the most money into flood protection right now?
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has been trying to put numbers to these questions, and a new paper from the effort published in the journal Nature Climate Change suggests the cumulative costs are already rising and likely to get ridiculous by 2050. Modeling population increases, economic growth, land subsidence and future climate change, the researchers estimate that the global cost of flooding in the world's 136 largest coastal cities could rise to $52 billion a year in the next few decades, up from about $6 billion in 2005.
