Quantifying climate change driven environmental losses in coastal areas

Climate Change (CC) may exacerbate the environmental damage due to coastal hazards. Quantifying the potential magnitude of the CC impacts on coastal wetlands and associated Coastal Ecosystem Services (CES) has always been a challenge for economists and ecologists, and therefore remains a significant knowledge gap. This is especially the case in data-scarce developing countries that are likely to suffer the most from CC, as their adaptive capacity to CC impacts is low.
The study presented here was undertaken to develop and formulate a practical framework to Quantify CC driven Environmental Losses (QuantiCEL) that adopts a novel scenario-based approach, grounded in economic valuation techniques, secondary data and expert opinions.
Applying the QuantiCEL framework to three developing countries (i.e. Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka) shows that, where the absolute loss value of CES by the end of the 21st century is concerned, food provision and tourism are the CES with higher loss values. However, art, amenity, and tourism are the highly affected CES where the percentage loss (by the end of the 21st century) relative to the present-day value of CES is concerned.