Coastal Futures (CoFu)
An interactive viewer for 21st century projections of coastal climatic impact-drivers
The recently released IPCC AR6 WGI assessment states with high confidence that all coastal climatic-impact drivers assessed therein (i.e. Relative sea level rise, coastal flooding and coastal erosion) will increase by mid-century in almost all regions of the world. This means that adaptation is now urgently needed to mitigate or reduce the climate change induced risks for coastal communities and assets. While local scale adaptation measures need to be informed by detailed local scale impact and risk assessments, available global data sets of coastal climatic-impact drivers, such as those assessed in IPCC AR6 WGI, are very useful for identifying global or regional hotspots of potential impacts. However, these data sets are produced by different institutes and universities spread around the world and are presented in many different studies, and thus it is cumbersome to compare and contrast different projections. Coastal Futures (CoFu) is an interactive online viewer, which for the first time, combines several published state-of-the-art data sets of 21st century projections of coastal climatic impact-drivers, including those assessed in IPCC AR6 WGI. CoFu enables coastal scientists, engineers, planners, managers and policy makers to quickly see how climatic impact-drivers such as relative sea level rise, extreme sea levels, coastal flooding, shoreline change and extreme waves are projected to change all over the world.
The Coastal Futures (CoFu) viewer is created and maintained by IHE Delft, The Netherlands (see Team CoFu) through a collaboration between the Department of Coastal and Urban Risk & Resilience and the Department of Hydroinformatics and Socio-Technical Innovation. IHE Delft expects that the free, centralized availability of multiple coastal climatic impact-driver projections for different time periods and climate scenarios will be of great benefit for many different stakeholders interested in coastal safety, coastal developments, and adaptation.