Our lab’s work has impact beyond the walls of academia. For example:

Sea-level rise

Our paper on Common Era sea-level change (Kopp et al., 2016) led the New York Times, was discussed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse on the floor of the United States Senate, and was tweeted by @BarackObama and @JohnLegend. It received extensive press coverage.

The framework for probabilistic projections of sea-level rise we developed in Kopp et al. (2014) (MATLAB projection and localization routines available) has been used by stakeholder groups including the Congressional Budget Office, the Fourth California Climate Assessment, the Third Oregon Climate Assessment, the California Ocean Science Trust, the Washington Coastal Resilience Project, the State of Maryland, the State of Delaware, the State of New Jersey, the City of Boston, the New Jersey Climate Change Alliance, and the New Zealand Ministry for the Environment. This framework also played a significant role in the construction of Federal sea-level rise projections for the Fourth National Climate Assessment. Our group and our collaborators are also in discussion with a variety of other stakeholder groups regarding this framework.

Our projections have also been incorporated into Climate Central’s Surging Seas website.


Looking for sea level data?

If you would like to access our sea-level projections for your region at a greater level of detail than is provided by Surging Seas, you may access them in the following ways:

  1. For a subset of U.S. sites, Kopp et al. (2014) projections are summarized in the American Climate Prospectus’s Physical Climate Data Tables (XLSX format).
  2. For all the sites considered in Kopp et al. (2014), local sea-level rise projections are summarized in Supplementary Table 7.
  3. A greater range of projections (more years, more quantiles, disaggregated by source, more sets of assumptions) are available through the LocalizeSL MATLAB package.

Please feel free to contact me if you need assistance.


Economic risks of climate change

The work in our book Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus formed the basis of a series of reports by the Risky Business Project, which is co-chaired by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen, and former hedge fund investor Tom Steyer. It received extensive press coverage.

This work was cited in the Office of Management and Budget’s Analytical Perspectives on President Obama’s FY 2016 and FY 2017 budgets. It was a key source for the Congressional Budget Office’s 2016 report Potential Increases in Hurricane Damage in the United States and for the Government Accountability Office’s 2017 report Information on Potential Economic Effects Could Help Guide Federal Efforts to Reduce Fiscal Exposure.