Assessing Climate Change Impacts, Sea Level Rise and Storm Surge Risk in Port Cities: A Case Study on Copenhagen

This study illustrates a methodology to assess economic impacts of climate change at city scale, focusing on sea level rise and storm surge. It is based on a statistical analysis of past storm surges in the studied city, matched to a geographical-information analysis of the population and asset exposure in the city, for various sea levels and storm surge characteristics. An assessment of direct losses in case of storm surge (i.e. of the damages to buildings and building content) can then be computed and the corresponding indirect losses – in the form of production and job losses, reconstruction duration, amongst other loses – deduced, allowing a risk analysis of the effectiveness of coastal flood protections, including risk changes due to climate change and sea level rise. This methodology is applied in the city of Copenhagen, capital of Denmark, which is potentially vulnerable to the effects of variability in sea level, as a low lying city....