Could your dream home be about to disappear underwater?

Are you dreaming about retiring to the coast and living near the sea? Is there a coastal town or city you’ve been visiting year after year for fish and chips and seaside pints which you’d like to move to at some point in the future? Because with sea levels rising some of the places where people currently live in coastal areas could find themselves underwater. This is going to happen in some places faster than others, but sea levels could rise by more than a metre by 2100 according to a survey of more than 100 experts.

The survey, Estimating global mean sea-level rise and its uncertainties by 2100 and 2300 from an expert survey (2020), reveals hundreds of millions of people could find their homes underwater if the worst-case scenarios for climate change actually happen. But it’s not just global warming and melting ice caps which are affecting sea levels, that’s just one part of a much wider problem. Sea levels aren’t just going up, land is also sinking into the sea according to Amar Rahman, global risk engineering practice leader for natural hazards resilience at Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich).

Land is sinking in part because of what we’re building on it. Rahman told VICE: “Coastal areas, especially where you have a high level of development, are actually sinking and it's primarily because of urbanisation. You're building the infrastructure for the city, extracting the groundwater, and disrupting the natural processes that have been going on for millennia. That's all contributing to the problem.”

These trends are having a huge impact on coastal cities across the world. Bangkok is particularly at risk, as are major cities from Lagos in Nigeria to Dhaka in Bangladesh. The Indonesian capital Jakarta, a megacity home to 30 million people, is sinking into the sea at such a speed that authorities are going to relocate government offices. Coastal erosion in New South Wales is threatening expensive beachfront homes and this is expected to get worse with sea levels continuing to rise. Common steps taken to protect homes in these situations, such as building sea walls, can only have a limited impact according to Zurich’s Rahman.

Rahman says: “Communities are talking about setting up sea walls to protect beaches and stop these houses from collapsing into the sea. But that's only a temporary measure because the problem is dynamic. When you have the sea level rising, you're going to have a different rate of erosion in different parts of the world, or different parts of the coast. If you build a seawall in one place you're diverting the problem to another part of the coast.”

Solutions to coastal erosion that don’t just push the problem away or onto other communities are costly, says Rahman. Such measures could include restricting human activity, limiting urbanisation in some areas, taking water conservation more seriously and improving soil. Coastal areas closer to home are also at risk because of rising sea levels. Parts of Europe and the UK could also end up underwater. But this isn’t just because of sea levels rising, climate change is also increasing the risk of extreme weather events and exacerbating seasonal flooding.

With a backdrop of rising sea levels, storm surges will increasingly be able to overwhelm coastal flood defences. “It’s a massive concern, in the long term, for homeowners and businesses located in these areas,” says Ralph De Mesquita, principal risk analyst for Zurich in the UK.

“For existing buildings, protecting against floods is about either keeping water out of your property, which we call flood resistance, or if water does get into your property, minimising the damage and speeding up the recovery time, which we call flood resilience,” adds De Mesquita.

De Mesquita told VICE that the climate has always varied when you look back in time but it’s the current pace of change that is causing concern. But long-term effects add to the problem. The ‘glacial rebound’, for instance, is causing the south of England to slow sink while Scotland is being pushed up, as if the whole of Britain was a seesaw.

We might not be about to see all coastal areas in Europe sinking underwater in our lifetimes, but we will definitely see more and more homes, businesses and communities submerged for brief periods of time as the frequency of flood events increases. Even places inland can be at risk of floods, which are exacerbated by climate change. Now couldn’t be a better time for us to decrease our carbon footprints and put a halt to climate change.