Integrating knowledge to assess coastal vulnerability to sea-level rise: The development of the DIVA tool
Introduction
Knowledge on coastal vulnerability enables scientists and policymakers to anticipate impacts that could emerge as a result of sea-level rise and other effects of climate change. It can thus help to prioritize management efforts that need to be undertaken to minimize risks or to mitigate possible consequences. In view of the high natural and socio-economic values that might be threatened or lost in coastal zones (Nicholls et al., 2007), it is therefore important to identify the types and magnitude of problems that different coastal areas may have to face, as well as possible solutions.
Global vulnerability assessments carried out by Hoozemans et al. (1993) and Baarse (1995) suggest that some 189 million people presently live below the once-per-1000-years storm-surge level. They estimate that, under current conditions, an average of 46 million people per year experience storm-surge flooding. Hoozemans et al. (1993) estimate that this number would rise to over 100 million people per year, assuming 1 m of sea-level rise and 30 years of socio-economic development. The assessment also projects that, under the same scenario, 59% of coastal wetlands will be lost.
These global vulnerability assessments played a central part in the preparation of the World Coast Conference 1993 and several IPCC reports. They have also been used extensively for further academic analyses, including integrated assessment modelling. However, with the widespread use of the global assessments, their limitations have become increasingly apparent. These limitations include the following:
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The obsolescence and low spatial resolution of underlying data sources;
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the limited number of scenarios used;
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the reliance of global mean sea-level rise as the only driver of coastal vulnerability;
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the non-consideration of bio-geophysical and socio-economic dynamics and feedback;
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arbitrary and rather simplistic assumptions regarding adaptation.
To address these limitations and thus provide updated policy-relevant information on coastal vulnerability involves two major challenges. First, knowledge in the form of data, scenarios and models from different natural, social and engineering science disciplines needs to be integrated in a much more comprehensive way than had ever been done for coastal vulnerability. This is particularly true for the feedbacks between natural and social systems, as well as including adaptation. Second, the integrated knowledge must be made available in a form that allows a diverse community of end-users and policy-makers to answer the specific questions they are confronted with.
This paper presents the systematic approach by which the EU-funded project DINAS-COAST (Dynamic and Interactive Assessment of National, Regional and Global Vulnerability of Coastal Zones to Sea-Level Rise) has addressed these challenges. The project developed an innovative, modular and iterative approach for integrating knowledge about coastal subsystems. This approach was then applied to produce the tool called DIVA (Dynamic and Interactive Vulnerability Assessment), a dynamic, interactive and flexible software tool that enables its users to produce quantitative information on a range of coastal vulnerability indicators, for user-selected climatic and socio-economic scenarios and adaptation strategies, on national, regional and global scales, covering all coastal nations. DIVA 1.5.5 was released on a CD-ROM in 2006 (DINAS-COAST Consortium, 2006) and is freely available for download from http://www.pik-potsdam.de/diva.
The purpose of this paper is not to give a full description of the integrated model itself. Rather the purpose is to present the process by which the integrated model was developed. In so doing, we hope to contribute to the methodological advancement of transdisciplinary, integrative science by providing the rapidly growing number of researchers active in this field with insights and tools that would enable many to tackle similar challenges. A detailed account of the integrated model can be found in the technical documentation that comes along with the tool (DINAS-COAST Consortium, 2006) and the academic literature (Hinkel, 2005, Hamilton et al., 2005, Brander et al., 2006, Vafeidis et al., 2006, Hinkel and Klein, 2007, McFadden et al., 2007a, McFadden et al., 2007b, Vafeidis et al., 2008).
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a brief overview of the evolution of methodologies applied for assessing the vulnerability of coastal zones to sea-level rise. Section 3 analyses the requirements that resulted from the two challenges outlined above. Section 4 then presents the method designed to address these challenges, that is, the method applied to develop the DIVA tool. Section 5 presents the tool's structure and components. Section 6 briefly presents some results of DIVA and compares these with results obtained by Hoozemans et al. (1993) and Baarse (1995). Section 7 discusses lessons learned in developing DIVA, and their significance to transdisciplinary science in general, and to vulnerability assessment in particular. Finally, Section 8 presents conclusions and proposes activities for future work.
Section snippets
Evolution of methodologies for assessing coastal vulnerability to sea-level rise
Before climate change emerged as an academic focus, vulnerability as such was not an important concept in coastal research. Traditionally, research in coastal zones has been conducted mainly by geologists, ecologists and engineers, roughly as follows (Klein, 2002):
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Geologists study coastal sedimentation patterns and the consequent dynamic processes of erosion and accretion over different spatial and temporal scales;
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ecologists study the occurrence, diversity and functioning of coastal flora and
Requirement analysis
DIVA has been developed to meet the demand for new information on coastal vulnerability on a global scale, addressing important limitations of the earlier global studies listed in the previous section. Important improvements are the inclusion of feedbacks within the combined natural and socio-economic coastal system and the more explicit and realistic representation of adaptation (see Section 5).
To make these improvements required integrating natural and social science knowledge in a much more
The DIVA method
The DIVA method is a method for building modular integrated computer models by distributed partners. It was developed to address the aforementioned challenge of supporting the process of integrating knowledge.
The DIVA method consists of two parts: a modelling framework and a semi-automated development process. The modelling framework frames the model to be built by providing a general a priori conceptualization of the system to be modelled; only those phenomena that can be expressed using the
Components
The DIVA method described above was applied to develop the DIVA tool. The DIVA tool comprises four main components:
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A detailed global database with biophysical and socio-economic coastal data;
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global and regionalized sea-level and socio-economic scenarios until the year 2100;
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an integrated model, consisting of interacting modules that assess biophysical and socio-economic impacts and the potential effects and costs of adaptation;
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a graphical user interface for selecting data and scenarios, running
DIVA tool application
This section presents selected results of the DIVA tool1 and discusses these against the background of the previous global vulnerability assessment carried out by Hoozemans et al. (1993). Note that the numbers produced by the two studies cannot be compared directly because the scenarios and definitions of impact indicators are different. The purpose of jointly presenting these results is to illustrate the
Discussion
One of the major challenges addressed in the development of the DIVA tool was the integration of knowledge. The central concept here is modularity, that is, the idea of encapsulating expert knowledge in the form of self-contained modules and making them available to others via well-defined interfaces. Hence, modularity enables experts with different disciplinary backgrounds to integrate their knowledge without the need to understand the details of each other's knowledge domains. Modularity also
Conclusions and outlook
This paper presented the development of the DIVA tool, an integrated tool for assessing vulnerability to sea-level rise on national, regional and global scales. In this development, two major challenges needed to be tackled. First, knowledge from distributed partners about the various coastal subsystems needed to be combined into an integrated model in a way that allowed changing data, algorithms and subsystem interactions during the development process. Second, the integrated model needed to
Acknowledgements
This paper is based on research that has been funded by the Research Directorate-General of the European Commission through its projects DINAS-COAST (contract number EVK2-CT-2000-00084). We thank Lars Exner for his technical support in preparing the figures and maps of this paper.
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