Quantifying future local impacts of sea level rise on buildings and infrastructure

Community resilience planners need tools to prepare for anticipated hazards and adapt to conditions associated with a changing climate. This paper presents a refined method for assessing the consequences of sea level rise on coastal communities by quantifying future impacts to buildings and infrastructure at a local level. While community resilience models typically address acute hazards, this work considers sea level rise and tides as a chronic hazard and its temporal impacts. Local sea level rise scenarios and tide predictions are combined to develop a time series of future water levels. The future water levels are mapped to the local topography to obtain the spatial extent of flooding. The proposed method is demonstrated using Galveston, Texas, USA as a testbed community considering buildings, electric substations, and a road/bridge transportation network. Impacts from sea level rise such as days exposed, days without electricity, and days with increases in travel time, are evaluated at the individual building level, rather than aggregate spatial scales. This method demonstrates the value of concurrently considering multiple infrastructure systems for community resilience planning of chronic hazards. Comparisons between building and census block levels show that for the testbed community evaluating future impacts of sea level rise at the census block level can lead to overestimating the number of buildings exposed.