Rising Sea Levels Could Swamp Major Cities and Displace Almost 200 Million People

With a "business as usual" approach 1to carbon emissions, the world's oceans could plausibly rise two meters by the end of the centur.y

The risk posed by rising seas may be even more dire than we thought.

A provocative new study suggests that as Earth’s climate continues to warm and the planet’s ice sheets continue to melt, seas could inundate coastal cities around the world, submerging vast swaths of land and displacing almost 200 million people by the end of the century.

If we continue to take a “business as usual” approach to carbon emissions, sea level rise could plausibly exceed two meters (about seven and a half feet) by 2100, the study showed. A rise of that magnitude — which is more than twice as high as the upper limit predicted in a 2013 U.N. climate assessment — would have “profound consequences for humanity,” the scientists behind the new research concluded.

New York, New Orleans, Miami, Shanghai, Mumbai, and some island nations could become permanently flooded, according to that scenario, disrupting economies and displacing up to 187 million people. Almost 1.8 million square kilometers (about 700,000 square miles) of land, including some used for farming, could be permanently flooded.

“It really is pretty grim,” study co-author Jonathan Bamber, a professor of physical geography at the University of Bristol in England, told CNN. “Two meters is not a good scenario.”

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