East Anglia Fenlands climate futures
A coherent 360° view on Climate Change models
This follows on the previous post on sea level rise in East Anglia, and follows in the next post on co-counselling.
Update: find here & here a refreshed synopsis & presentation based on newer information, among a collection here of resources to build your own maps…
It all started with a Children’s Tent at Streets for Life event by Extinction Rebellion early July in central Cambridge UK. A simple map, like that above right, showed the possible encroachment of the coastline with 5 and 10 m sea level rise resulting from global warming and polar ice melt.
At about the same time Terry Jackson and I launched a social enterprise for local community engagement, which “will provide benefit to digitally-excluded groups in isolated, often deprived, lowland rural communities at future risk from rising sea-levels and flooding owing to global warming.”
In the process of setting up an online information infrastructure — maps, gazetteer, ecological assessment etc.— it became apparent that the top paper map could be not only refined, but also augmented with publicly available data: a correct local climate change story is fully detailed in this story map and sketched here.
Sea Level Rise
Investigating this uncovered some time-frames, which of course interests everyone as much as potential sea level rise: “experts now estimate there is a 5 percent chance 21st century sea-level rise will exceed 2 m.” Quantifying this arrived at this arresting map of future flooding scenarios for Cambridge and the villages immediately north of it, which is where I live.
Temperature
If global warming drives polar ice melt and sea level rise, what does the temperature régime hold for us locally in the future? It turns out there are abundant if localised historical data that have been put in the context of our region in this blog post.
Flood risk from river and sea
Flooding is always in the news wintertime in Britain, and there are again comprehensive government data to document and model this. And there are relatively simple mapping techniques to sort the landward flooding from the coastal inundation components, respectively from water runoff and sea level rise. While that aspect is detailed here and here, the important outcome is how much land will possibly be inundated in national context? Fenlands risk for flooding, high to low, are dark to light blues.
Affected settlements
Apart from when this might happen, what interests us is, what are the affected areas? Maps come to the rescue, by overlaying areas affected by sea level rise over settlements in Cambridgeshire — respectively from Ordnance Survey and Wikipedia derived data.
Timing
Everyone asks us “OK, but when is this going to happen?”. The scientific consensus and further documents from IPCC show these time scales:
Prognosis
The numbers above confirm conclusions from the earlier blog post regarding the impact of flooded land from sea level rise, together with added info on settlements:
- mid-century consensus and models put sea level rise at 0.5 m. and temperature anomalies below 3°C in a moderate emissions scenario, while end-century estimates are 2 m. above 3°C in a ‘far tail’ scenario, and a century later is 6m. and below 9°C in an extreme scenario.
- separate calculations point to an almost doubling in land submergence from sea level rise, in other words a fifth to a half of the land would become un-arable in East Anglia at the end of this and of the next century.
- the impact on population is also dramatic at almost half the population and a third of the settlements would be affected
