A two-period model of coastal urban adaptation

What factors can motivate a coastal city anticipating future damages from sea level rise to make investment in proactive adaptation? And what might be the role of coastal climate services in facilitating proactive adaptation decisions?

We address these questions with a two-period coastal urban adaptation model where the present and future time periods are distinguished. An important feature of the model is describing decision-making under inevitable uncertainty (as the magnitude of future sea level rise and induced damages are both uncertain). The urban planning agent has to make at present an investment decision: to invest or not to invest in climate adaptation (in the form of construction of coastal protection), and, if invest, how much?

Our analysis of the model reveals a discontinuous ‘regime shift’ in investment decisions: with model parameters changing, the urban agent can discontinuously switch from the ‘business-as-usual’ strategy (when no adaptation investment is taken) to a proactive adaptation.

Video presentation: (prepared for the Online Conference on Nonlinear Dynamics & Complexity)
“A two-period model of coastal urban adaptation”