Scott A. Kulp and Benjamin H. Strauss (Climate Central); published in Nature Communications (Springer Nature)

People on land exposed to sea-level rise and coastal flooding (Kulp & Strauss 2019)

Estimates of how many people live on land below the local high-tide line (mean higher-high water) and below the local once-a-year coastal flood level, at today's sea level and with the sea levels projected for 2050 and 2100 under three emissions scenarios (RCP2.6, 4.5 and 8.5) by two sets of projections (Kopp et al. 2014 and 2017), for the world, the small island developing states and 134 countries. Elevations come from CoastalDEM, a correction of NASA's SRTM made with a neural network; people are counted where they lived in 2010 (LandScan). Coastal defences are not considered, so the figures measure exposure, not flooding.

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Licence: CC BY 4.0
What the terms say: “Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.”
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Credit we give: Kulp, S. A. & Strauss, B. H. (2019). New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding. Nature Communications 10, 4844. doi:10.1038/s41467-019-12808-z. CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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Cite as: Kulp, S.A., Strauss, B.H. New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding. Nat Commun 10, 4844 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12808-z

Files

Supplementary Data 1: people (millions, 2010 population) on land below the future local high tide line (Perm) and below it plus the local 1-year coastal flood return level (RL1), at present-day sea level and for 2050 and 2100 under K14 and K17 with RCP2.6, 4.5 and 8.5, by CoastalDEM, SRTM, JAXA and MERITDEM, as 5th, 50th and 95th percentiles, for the World, the SIDS and 134 countries. 253,535 bytes.
https://media.springernature.com/original/springer-static/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-019-12808-z/MediaObjects/41467_2019_12808_MOESM4_ESM.csv
"Description of Additional Supplementary Files" (1 page): what Supplementary Data 1-5 contain, their units, the meaning of Perm and RL1 and of the percentiles for K14 and K17, and the 0.01 million cut-off. 65,044 bytes.
https://media.springernature.com/original/springer-static/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-019-12808-z/MediaObjects/41467_2019_12808_MOESM3_ESM.pdf
The corrected article (12 pages). Table 1 (page 3) prints the global CoastalDEM and SRTM totals as median and 90% interval for every projection, scenario and year, which the transform checks cell by cell against Supplementary Data 1; the sentences the scope and the cross-checks rely on are on pages 1 to 3, 5 and 9, and the licence on page 12. 3,903,782 bytes.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z.pdf

Status

Programme: Published 29 October 2019 (volume 10) as a one-off study; Author Correction published 12 December 2019. No update is planned.
Updates: One-off (published 2019, corrected 2019)
Last check: Unchanged since the last fetch (2026-10-25T10:14:35Z)