Collection 

Sea-level rise

Sea-level rise, one of the first identified impacts of climate change, poses a serious risk to a large part of the world’s population who live in coastal areas. There is a pressing need to understand the physical processes driving sea-level rise and coastal inundation to improve projections and provide the best available information to decision makers to inform impact assessments and adaptive management strategies.  

This is a vigorous and dynamic field of research and our scientific understanding of the drivers, impacts and future projections has greatly improved since the last report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2014. With the next IPCC report not due until 2021, scientists and policymakers alike need to keep abreast of these rapid developments. In order to support that process, this collection brings together important, open-access research in sea-level rise published in Nature Communications since the last IPCC report.

This collection has been curated by the Earth science editorial team at Nature Communications and will be updated with new research on a regular basis. The collection is divided into three research areas, observations and drivers of sea-level variability, ice sheet dynamics and their contribution to sea-level rise, and coastal vulnerability to rising sea levels. We hope that the collection proves to be a useful resource for researchers and decision makers who need to manage the high scientific output currently being published.