TY - JOUR
T1 - Sea-level change
T2 - The expected economic cost of protection or abandonment in the United States
AU - Yohe, Gary W.
AU - Schlesinger, Michael E.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States Department of Commerce through the Global Change Program, and the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Carbon Dioxide Research Program, Environmental Sciences Division of the U.S. Department of Energy under Grant ATM 95-22681. The authors also acknowledge the assistance offered in completing this work by James Neumann, Steven Swain and Ayman Ghanem.
PY - 1998
Y1 - 1998
N2 - Three distinct models from earlier work are combined to: (1) produce probabilistically weighted scenarios of greenhouse-gas-induced sea-level rise; (2) support estimates of the expected discounted value of the cost of sea-level rise to the developed coastline of the United States, and (3) develop reduced-form estimates of the functional relationship between those costs to anticipated sea-level rise, the cost of protection, and the anticipated rate of property-value appreciation. Four alternative representations of future sulfate emissions, each tied consistently to the forces that drive the initial trajectories of the greenhouse gases, are considered, Sea-level rise has a nonlinear effect on expected cost in all cases, but the estimated sensitivity fails short of being quadratic. The mean estimate for the expected discounted cost across the United States is approximately $2 billion (with a 3% real discount rate), but the range of uncertainty around that estimate is enormous; indeed, the loth and 90th percentile estimates run from less than $0.2 billion up to more than $4.6 billion. In addition, the mean estimate is very sensitive to associated sulfate emissions; it is, specifically, diminished by nearly 25% when base-case sulfate emission trajectories are considered and by more than 55% when high-sulfate trajectories are allowed.
AB - Three distinct models from earlier work are combined to: (1) produce probabilistically weighted scenarios of greenhouse-gas-induced sea-level rise; (2) support estimates of the expected discounted value of the cost of sea-level rise to the developed coastline of the United States, and (3) develop reduced-form estimates of the functional relationship between those costs to anticipated sea-level rise, the cost of protection, and the anticipated rate of property-value appreciation. Four alternative representations of future sulfate emissions, each tied consistently to the forces that drive the initial trajectories of the greenhouse gases, are considered, Sea-level rise has a nonlinear effect on expected cost in all cases, but the estimated sensitivity fails short of being quadratic. The mean estimate for the expected discounted cost across the United States is approximately $2 billion (with a 3% real discount rate), but the range of uncertainty around that estimate is enormous; indeed, the loth and 90th percentile estimates run from less than $0.2 billion up to more than $4.6 billion. In addition, the mean estimate is very sensitive to associated sulfate emissions; it is, specifically, diminished by nearly 25% when base-case sulfate emission trajectories are considered and by more than 55% when high-sulfate trajectories are allowed.
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U2 - 10.1023/A:1005338413531
DO - 10.1023/A:1005338413531
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0031938496
SN - 0165-0009
VL - 38
SP - 447
EP - 472
JO - Climatic Change
JF - Climatic Change
IS - 4
ER -