Coastal Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerabilities - Climate ...

Physical Climate Forces 39in input data and outcomes and uses descriptive terminology that is familiar to coastalmanagers. Such an approach could also be extended to include multiple stressors.Vulnerability assessment for climate change decision making is an emerging discipline(USGCRP, 2011). To improve these assessments in the coastal zone, multiple factorsneed to be incorporated so that potential outcomes can be examined in a holisticframework (Nicholls et al., 2008). The vulnerability of a specific location, ecosystem, orcommunity to climate change impacts is determined by a mix of environmental, social,economic, and other non-climate factors that influence its overall exposure and adaptivecapacity (NSTC, 2005; Marra et al., 2007); however, current vulnerability assessmentstypically fail to meet this goal (Harvey & Woodroffe, 2008). For the most part,they focus on only one exposure element such as elevation or rate of shoreline change.Sensitivity and adaptive capacity are often explored in similarly isolated ways (Hinkel,Figure 2-8. Coastal elevation analysis for the U.S. Pacific coast, showing areas within 1-6 metersof NAVD88. Source: Weiss et al., 2011; http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-011-0024-x, SupplementalFigure 2.