Usable science for managing the risks of sea-level rise
The impacts of sea‐level rise pose growing threats to coastal communities, economies, and ecosystems, and decisions made today—in areas like land‐use policies, coastal development, and infrastructure investment—will affect exposure and vulnerability for generations to come.
Thus, the usability of sea‐level science is a pressing concern. Ensuring usability requires grappling with deep uncertainty in long‐term sea‐level projections, the relationship between long‐term trends and the impacts of short‐lived extreme events, and the ways in which the physical coast, as well as people and ecosystems along the coast, respond to increasingly frequent flooding. At the same time, it also requires more extensive and deliberate stakeholder engagement throughout the scientific process, as well as cognizance of the political economy of linking stakeholder‐engaged science to action.