Publication successes for sea-level rise experts

SMMI members Robert Nicholls, Sally Brown and Mark Pickering have had a series of high-level publications over the summer revolving around the impacts of sea-level rise.

Earlier this year, Robert and Sally published a paper in Earth’s Future on the impacts of sea-level rise, which relate to the Paris Agreement, an important policy document setting emission and temperature warming targets. This paper and another co-authored by the Southampton team is being used by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) in reviewing and accepting a major climate change report due in October, and was also featured in a News and Views piece in Nature. Sally and co-author Phil Goodwin (Ocean and Earth Science) have won a £15K from BEIS to extend these findings. 

Sally and Robert then had a paper relating to adapting to sea-level rise in Nature Climate Change building on their work in Bangladesh and the Maldives. A further paper, also with Mark who used data from his PhD in Nature discussed how wetlands evolve as sea-levels rise, and the possibility in the right conditions that they could expand in area with sea-level rise, rather than decline. This lead to local media interest, with Mark being interviewed on BBC South Today, featuring in their lunchtime (go to 5.45), evening (got to 9.20) and late night (go to 7.00) bulletins. Sally also has a further paper accepted for Nature Communications on heritage and coastal flooding, and an article published in The Conservation about adapting to sea-level rise in Africa with over 10,000 views and subsequent radio interviews in South Africa.