Climate: Human-driven sea-level rise increases frequency of coastal extremes (Nature Climate Change)
11 June 2026
Human-driven sea-level rise has quadrupled the frequency of extreme coastal sea-level events since 1900, according to a study published in Nature Climate Change. The findings suggest that climate change has already altered coastal flood risk and highlights the need to integrate these changes into adaptation and risk management strategies.
Extreme sea levels occur when increased baseline sea levels combine with tides and storm surges, leading to coastal flooding that can damage infrastructure and ecosystems. More than 680 million people globally live in low-lying coastal regions, where even small changes in sea level can significantly affect flood risk. Although long-term sea-level rise has been widely studied, the extent to which human-driven climate change has already influenced the frequency of extreme events has remained uncertain.
Sönke Dangendorf and colleagues combined tide gauge observations with climate model simulations to analyse changes in extreme sea-level frequency from 1900 to 2005. Their global analysis shows that the median frequency of a 1-in-100-year flood (that is, 1% chance of occurring in a given year) from sea-level rise has increased more than twelvefold over the study period to a 1-in-8-year flood (a 12.5% chance of occurring in a given year). Human-driven radiative forcing — the balance of solar radiation absorbed and released by the planet’s atmosphere influenced by human factors such as greenhouse gas emissions and land-use changes — alone increased the likelihood of such events by approximately fourfold. Natural variability, which includes factors like volcanic aerosols and El Niño–Southern Oscillation, for example, also contributed but to a lesser extent across most coastlines.
The authors conclude that, given the severity of the change in median frequency, urgent adaptation and sustained mitigation is crucial to limit future risk of flooding events. However, they note that a limitation of the study is the unequal distribution of direct measurements via tide gauges, with high concentrations around the coasts of North America and Europe. They also not the lack of availability of historical climate model simulations past 2005.
- Article
- Published: 10 June 2026
Dangendorf, S., Sun, Q., Maduwantha, P. et al. Human-driven sea-level rise has quadrupled the frequency of coastal sea-level extremes since 1900. Nat. Clim. Chang. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-026-02659-0
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