TED Talks Daily
Mangroves, storm walls and other ways to protect coasts from climate change | Dave Sivaprasad
18 Apr 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Disappearing coastlines are a place of huge exposure to climate change and all the socioeconomic consequences that are bound to come from it. Are governments ready? In his 2022 talk from TED at BCG, coastline resilience advocate Dave Sivaprasad outlines ways to tackle this complex challenge. It's coming up after a short break.
So 40% of the world's population live near the coast.
Chapter 2: What challenges do coastal communities face due to climate change?
So we've got sea level rise, intense storms, and by some estimates, half a billion to a billion people will be adversely affected by what's going to happen on the coast. But that's not the only problem. it's a bit more complicated than that. It's not just storms are increasing, sea level rise is going to flood these areas.
You have secondary issues such as acidification that's going to damage coral reefs and natural systems. You have changing wind patterns because ocean temperatures are increasing and storms are getting more intense and also more unpredictable. And on top of that, you've got increased rainfall and flooding that is happening deeper in the coast, in coastal communities. This is a big problem.
And it's a personal problem for me as well. I'm from Singapore, an island state in Southeast Asia, many coastal communities. I worry about what's going to happen to my region, how it's going to impact my family. I've got three boys that have grown up along the coast. And with that, I've spent the last two years helping countries and coastal communities build resilience against climate change.
What's the challenge? The challenge is no two coasts are alike. They're highly diverse, physically diverse, They have different distributions of populations, and they're socio-economically different in terms of the communities that live there. Now, there are many solutions to protect the coast. You have sea walls, storm barriers. We can restore mangroves, and this can protect the coast.
The challenge is not so much the solutions. The challenge is actually what's the right mix of solutions that fits the local context and delivers the highest socio-economic return. Now, let me illustrate this with an example. I worked with a government in Southeast Asia, a country with a large population, diverse set of islands, many coastal communities spread across.
And one region in particular faced a complex interplay of challenges, rising sea levels that were causing permanent flooding, increasing storms that were damaging the coast, a large proportion of vulnerable people in poverty living in low-lying areas. On top of that, land subsidence that made matters worse.
So we worked with the government to model the impact of climate change over the coming decades to answer questions like which parts of the coast will be flooded, which populations will be impacted. Where would schools, hospitals, critical infrastructure be damaged? How would this impact crops, water systems? What would be the impact of natural ecosystems that are important to this country?
And importantly, what this did was that it combined climate science with data analytics, with local context, and linked it to socioeconomic impact. Now, to give an example, one particular community faced the risk of 100,000 people potentially being displaced because of increasing sea levels.
Eight percent of the economy and almost half of the region's wetland reserves were at risk of being damaged. Now, in addition, with this insight, the government was able to better understand the knock-on effects that this would have on public health, on food security, on forced migration. So a lot of issues. So what do you do about that?
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