Impact of Sea Level Rise on Developing Countries

After my last post about the Maldives in particular I would like to take a look at a wider perspective in this post. The focus will be on the Impact of sea level rise in developing countries.

The current sea level rise is estimated to be 3.2 millimeters per year. This is a 60% higher value that estimated in the IPPC report in 2007 and has a huge impact of predictions of all effect. (Link to source) Non-the-less I will need to use data that has been publish before this new data came out, as their is newer data available yet.

A big issue in international politics is the question if developing countries will be able to catch up to the established industrialized countries in the future. Therefore it is very interesting to have a look at the effects of the global environmental change on these countries.

In this post the particular focus lies on the question, which countries are most affected, based on data from a World Bank report, which has been published in 2007 (Link to the report).

The most impacted developing country in view of the land area are the Bahamas. Close to 12 % of the total land area will be affected by a 1 Meter SLR (see figure 1 below). Out of all developing countries The Bahamas are by far the most effected country when a look at only this parameter is taken.

Figure 1.

The data is figure 1 leads directly to the presented data in figure 2. The Bahamas may be a highly affected country in terms of the area, but which countries society will be most affected? To estimate this figure 2 shows the percentage of affected population. The Bahamas are still one of the most affected countries (about 5% of the total population), but Vietnam has by far the highest percentage of affected population with about 10.5%. Second is Egypt with about 9%. With an estimated population of about 91,5 million people in Vietnam (Source), this means that more than 9 Million people would be affected by a 1 meter sea level rise.

Figure 2.

Considering the large proportion of affected people in Vietnam it is not surprising that a sea level rise of 1 meter would also have the largest impact on Vietnam's GDP (as seen in figure 3). The impact is estimated to be as high as about 10%.

Figure 3.

This look at the effects of a global sea level rise, as part of the global environmental change, shows the high impact and threat that some developing countries face on their path to catch up with the industrialized world. But it also shows the different magnitude of impact of different parameters.

The presented data is only a small outtake out of the World Bank report. In the full report a closer look at different regions of the world is taken and more detailed data is provided.