Mumbai May Have Less Than 30 Years To Survive If...

Rising sea level could affect three times more people than originally thought, a new study has found. According to an analysis by Climate Central announced on Tuesday in Nature Communications, land housing 300 million people will flood annually by 2050. High tides may permanently inundate land home to 150 million people. The new study improves upon an earlier research that was based on satellite images but was prone to error due to the failure in differentiating the topography from trees and buildings. The researchers this time combined artificial intelligence with the images to arrive on a more accurate reading.

Driven by climate change, global mean sea level rose 11–16 cm in the 20th century. Even with sharp, immediate cuts to carbon emissions, it could rise another 0.5 m this century, earlier studies had found. The challenge for scientists is to translate these seal-level projections translate into coastal flooding. Until now, that translation relied on NASA’s satellite image. But the authors of the new study says that method models the elevation of upper surfaces and not bare earth terrain, and thus suffers from large error. To overcome this, the researchers used a new method called Coastal DEM that relied on neural network (artificial intelligence) to estimate the accurate earth terrain.

The threat is particularly severe in Asian countries. The study says more than 70% of the total number of people worldwide currently living on implicated land are in eight Asian countries: China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan. 35 million in India alone could be threatened. Outside of Asia, 20 other countries are expected to see land currently home to 10% or more of their total populations fall below end-of-century high tide lines.

A map of the future...

Mumbai, India’s financial capital could more or less be wiped out; Shanghai, China’s bustling commercial hub would be divided by the East China Sea; much of Bangkok, Thailand, would be inundated; Southern Vietnam, the new growth engine of global business, would disappear and waters would shrink the capital city of Ho Chi Minh. In fact, the new study finds 110 million people already live on land below the current annual sea level — a precarious state achieved through coastal barriers and other defensive measures. But such efforts will fail to keep at bay the rising waters of the future. Below is a visual projection for Mumbai, by the New York Times:

By – Abhishek Singh

Content - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/timestopten.cms